Polar attraction
Striking a balance between artistic imagination and historical accuracy is essential for Costa Book of the Year-winning author Stef Penney, she tells Tina Jackson
Writing and exploration go hand in hand for writer and filmmaker Stef Penney – quite literally, in her new novel, Under a Pole Star. A lead title for its publisher Quercus, the epic historical tale of rival Arctic expeditions marks a return to the bleak historical territory of her game-changing, Costa-winning 2005 debut, A Tenderness of Wolves.
‘My wanting to write about polar exploration goes back to my research for The Tenderness of Wolves – I did a lot of reading about 19th century Arctic travel then, and I’ve always found such accounts deeply compelling,’ says Stef.
Stef adapted Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic account of his experiences as a member of Captain Scott’s Polar expedition team, The Worst Journey in the World, for the BBC. It was first broadcast in 2008. ‘More specifically, that made me start thinking about explorer rivalry. When I got stuck into reading about the American quest to reach the North Pole, something crystallised. The accounts of [rival explorers] Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, and the controversy about who reached the Pole first (if at all), got me thinking about what sort of people explorers are, and why they might lie.’
Crawling out, as she puts it, from ‘under the weight of all that research’, Stef created her central character, Flora, the daughter of a Dundee whaler, who leads British Polar expeditions in the 1890s. Similarly to her creator, Flora is a self-defined Scottish woman who thinks on a wide scale and chooses her own path. ‘Why did I want to write about a woman explorer? Isn’t it obvious? It felt like a massive gap waiting to be filled,’ says Stef.
Like Mrs Ross in A Tenderness of Wolves, who heads out from her isolated home in 1860s Canada into the wilderness to clear her son’s name, Flora has agency. ‘I’m not interested in writing characters whose fates are decided by the agency of others, so Flora couldn’t just be someone’s wife, someone’s daughter, tagging along or waiting at home. Also, the fact that she is a woman in a very masculine world leads to interesting conflicts and possibilities.’
It’s probably obvious that I love research – that’s one of the bonuses of historical fiction, learning things I didn’t know. It makes writing an exploration – you follow signs, you find yourself in places you didn’t know existed.