Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole

Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole is Cecilia Blomdahl's photographic account of her life in Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, set in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. She has lived there since 2015 with her partner, Christoffer, and her dog, Grim, in a place where polar bears roam free and the northern lights burn through much of the winter.

The book pairs evocative writing with large-format photography to describe what it takes to adapt to an inhospitable climate. The story opens in the darkness of the polar night and reveals the pull of the place gradually, as daylight returns months later. Between wintry landscapes, endangered Arctic animals and natural phenomena few people ever witness, Blomdahl folds in personal stories and first-hand advice for anyone hoping to thrive in unusual living conditions.

Published by DK in 2024, at 256 pages and 8.74 by 10.39 inches, the volume became a New York Times bestseller. For landscape photographers it offers a sustained lesson in scarce light, long exposures and composition in frozen terrain; for any reader it poses a wider question, why someone chooses to live at the edge of the world and what they find there that they could not find anywhere else.