A warm welcome to writer-in-residence Clara Arnaud

We are very pleased to welcome French writer Clara Arnaud to Artica Svalbard for a spring residency running from April to June 2025.

Clara is the winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France, and her work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores the relationship between human beings and the rest of the living world. With a background in international cooperation and a strong interest in ecological and political questions, her writing is deeply shaped by time spent in remote and mountainous regions, including her current home in the central Pyrenees.

She arrived in Svalbard aboard the Linden sailing ship and is currently working on a new novel in which one of the central characters is a glaciologist. The project aims to give voice to the cryosphere—reimagining the glacier not simply as a backdrop to human action, but as a character in its own right. By blending field observation with fiction, Clara’s work investigates how climate science is practised on the ground, and how non-human perspectives might reshape the way we tell stories of environmental change.

While in residence, Clara will also offer a series of public creative writing workshops in Longyearbyen. These will invite participants to explore the question “how do we stand on a fading world?”, producing collective responses through storytelling, poetry, and reflection. She is also interested in engaging with youth and educational settings, sharing her writing process and encouraging others to explore literary approaches to ecological thinking.

We look forward to following Clara’s time in the Arctic and sharing more from her work in the coming weeks.