Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler is a bestselling and award-winning writer of ten nonfiction books about travel and travellers. They include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (Jonathan Cape UK, Random House US, 1996), The Magnetic North (Jonathan Cape UK, Farrar, Straus & Giroux US, 2011) and Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age (Jonathan Cape UK, Pantheon US, 2019). Sara has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1999.

Her shorter writing includes hundreds of articles and book reviews published for, among others, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and the Spectator. She has contributed essays to a number of books, as well as forewords to reissued classics, for example Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (2007). Broadcasting includes writing and presenting eleven BBC Radio 4 From Our Own Correspondent segments from 2016 to the present and the Radio 4 five-part series To Strive, to Seek (2012).

Teaching experience includes writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and the Royal Holloway MA programme. Sara has led writing workshops at literary festivals at home and abroad and lectured widely for two decades as well as judging various literary prizes. In 2010 she was a Hawthornden Fellow.

Sara lives in north London. She has served two terms as trustee of the London Library (2006–09 and 2014–) and has been contributing editor of the Literary Review since 2009. She is currently working on a project about the Bronx.