Man Who Loved Siberia
Siberia, to me, is a fairy-tale land.
Fritz Dörries set out on his first trip to Eastern Siberia in 1877, when there were still blank spaces on maps of the world. Travelling alone or with his brothers, he climbed mountains, traversed great rivers, explored remote islands and crossed treacherous lakes of ice, always with one purpose: to augment man's knowledge of the natural world.
Bears, tigers, vipers, bandits, stormy seas, frostbite, ice chasms fathoms deep - every danger was faced head on and overcome. And yet he remained defenceless against the charms of the landscape, and the animals, birds and butterflies he found there.
Through his twenty-two years in Siberia, Dörries collected a wealth of essential material for scientific institutions, fundamental to our understanding of fauna and flora. This account of his adventures, set down for his daughters in his ninetieth year, and adapted for publication by Roy Jacobsen and Anneliese Pitz, is his second great legacy.
Translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella
Roy Jacobsen is one of Norway's most internationally renowned writers. His novel The Unseen, a phenomenal bestseller in his own country, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017
Anneliese Pitz came to Norway from Belgium in 1974. She has a PhD in linguistics from Trondheim, has been teaching for 24 years at Oslo University.