ALONE IN ANTARCTICA

In January last year, as some of you may remember, 34-year-old British woman Felicity Aston – whose first 'expedition' involved being bribed up Helvellyn in the rain at the age of nine with a packet of Opal Fruits – completed her solo crossing of the Antarctic. Her honest tweets from the incredible journey were followed by ten thousand people on Twitter.

I’m excited to announce that this summer Summersdale will be publishing Felicity’s book about the journey – the emotional and psychological journey, as well as the physical one.

What would it feel like to be out there alone in such vast emptiness? I think a lot of people want to know how it would feel to be isolated like that, and what drives a person to do such a thing.

Only three people in the world have crossed Antarctica alone. The first two were men and both Norwegian. Just to go one better, Felicity didn’t use kites or parasails to assist her. Past expeditions had pushed her but she didn’t feel she had found her limits. Her achievement featured in more than 250 national newspapers around the globe, on countless radio and TV broadcasts.

The people who followed her on Twitter and the more than 130,000 people who listened to her ‘phonecasts’ over the 59-day journey responded to her openness and humour – the frustration of hallucinating the smell of freshly baked bread, and the difficulty of doing laundry at -40ºC, as well as the solitude and the difficulty keeping going. Felicity brings a fresh voice to Antarctic exploration for a new generation.

Felicity Aston has spent over a decade travelling, working and living all over the Polar Regions; she led the first British women’s team to cross Greenland, and in 2009 led the most international team of women ever to ski to the South Pole, the subject of her first book, Call of the White, a finalist in the Banff Mountain Book Competition in 2011.