Clara Arnaud Returns to Artica Svalbard

Clara Arnaud, spring 2025, photo: Artica Svalbard

We’re delighted to welcome back Clara Arnaud for her second residency with Artica Svalbard, following her initial stay in spring 2025. Clara is a French writer and winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France. Her work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores ecological and political themes, often questioning how we inhabit and affect the living world.

During her first residency, Clara began work on a new novel in which a glaciologist becomes one of the central characters alongside the glacier itself. This narrative seeks to give voice to the cryosphere and present the Arctic not as a passive backdrop but as an active, fragile participant in planetary change. She has just returned from a week in Ny-Ålesund, where she deepened her research by observing Arctic science and glaciology in the field.

While in Longyearbyen this autumn, Clara is also hosting a series of creative writing workshops inviting participants to explore storytelling beyond a human-centred perspective. These sessions experiment with language and narrative to reflect our entangled relationships with Arctic life forms, ecosystems, and objects.

There are still a handful of places available for the workshop at Svalbard Museum on Monday 20 October (18:00–20:30). This event invites participants to bring museum artefacts to life through writing, guided prompts, and conversation. For details and to book, visit: https://www.articasvalbard.no/2025/creative-writing-at-svalbard-museum

We’re thrilled to have Clara back with us and look forward to seeing how her time in Svalbard continues to shape this ambitious new work.