Clara Arnaud
Clara Arnaud, Photo: Marie-Laure Duarte
In residence: April – June 2025
Clara Arnaud is a French writer and winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France. Her literary work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores political and ecological themes, questioning our way of inhabiting the world. She has travelled extensively off the beaten track, mostly on foot or horseback, and has also worked as a consultant in international cooperation, leading missions across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Since 2022, Clara has dedicated herself to writing and activism focused on the preservation of mountain ecosystems. She lives year-round in a remote valley in the central Pyrenees. Her writing is naturalistic, paying close attention to physical, geological, and biological phenomena. Inspired by the anthropologist Anna Tsing, her work is driven by the question: How can we best use our research to stem the tide of destruction?
During her residency at Artica Svalbard, Clara will begin work on a new novel in which one of the central characters is a glaciologist, giving voice to the cryosphere. The story will reflect how glaciology is carried out in the field—embodying climate science through strong, complex characters—and aims to elevate a glacier from backdrop to protagonist. The novel seeks to reveal the Arctic not as a passive setting, but as an active and fragile participant in planetary change.
This work-in-progress draws on Clara’s longstanding interest in non-human storytelling. Like the rivers, horses, bears, and mountains that have featured as central characters in her earlier books, this novel will invite readers to extend empathy to the ice itself. Drawing on—but also subverting—the tropes of polar adventure literature, Clara’s narrative will explore grief and disappearance, but also emergence and imagination. By blurring the boundaries between science and poetry, visibility and invisibility, she hopes to make the unheard voices of the Arctic resonate on the page.
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