Sara Wheeler

Sara Diane Wheeler (born 20 March 1961) is an English travel author and biographer. In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Quotes

... The Arctic is the lead player in the drama of climate change, and polar bears are its poster boys.
- Wheeler, Sara (February 2011). The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4299-9194-0. (1st edition 2009) (quote from p. 4)

... Throughout my writing life, travel has lent a vehicle in which to explore the inner terrain of fears and desires we stumble through every day. Writing about travel allowed flexibility and freedom within a rigid frame of train journeys, weather, and a knackered tent. The creative process is an escape from personality (T. S. Eliot said that), and so is the open road. And a journey goes in fits and starts, like life.
- Wheeler, Sara (22 January 2013). Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-86547-878-7. (quote from p. xiv)

What no one ever quite gets used to is the brutalizing effect of the wind. The average wind speed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (12 knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated.
- Wheeler, Sara (October 2014). Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica. Random House Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8041-5242-6. (quote from pp. 9–10)

I am very much a generalist as opposed to a specialist. It's rather unfashionable, but I feel someone's got to be one. So every book is a new departure.
- (July 22, 2017)"Access All Areas In Conversation with Sara Wheeler". HKTDC, YouTube. (quote at 1:58 of 1:15:22)

... One scholar says Tolstoy tells us to give away our money; Dostoevsky tells us to go to church; Chekhov says "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do"; Gogol says "To hell with it." But they all deal with a fumbling search for certainties with which we all engage. And they are failures in one sense or another, as we all are.
- Wheeler, Sara (5 November 2019). "Introduction". Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5247-4802-9.

The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, self-deprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train.
- Ian Sansom, (1 March 2023)"Glowing Still by Sara Wheeler review: funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel". The Telegraph.