Chasing the Light by Jesse Blackadder

A photo by Viktor Lyagushkin with Natalie Avseenko as a cover for a book.

A fictional recounting of the little-known true story of the first woman to ever set foot on Antarctica, and her extraordinary fight to get there

It’s the early 1930s. Antarctic open-sea whaling is booming and new commercial giant Unilever has a stranglehold on the industry. The territorial race for Antarctica is also in full swing, with Sir Douglas Mawson voyaging on Discovery to reinforce British-Australian interests and pre-empt Norwegian claims. Amelia Earhart is blazing a trail (on land and in the air) for intrepid women, but although women have been applying to join Antarctic expeditions for more than 20 years, none have been accepted.

Against this backdrop, the resupply vessel Thorshavn sets sail from Cape Town, carrying the Norwegian whaling magnate Lars Christensen and fuel for his fleet of factory ships, which are hunting whales through the uncharted wild waters of the Southern Ocean to the very edge of the Antarctic ice.

The story of this shot is here

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