What do the icy continent and its resilient inhabitants tell us about the comfortable existence of the rest of the globe?

Children’s and Young Adult

Antarctica and its fauna as well as researchers and explorers are the heroes of David Böhm’s richly illustrated book. The South Pole of Roald Amundsen and his rival Robert Falcon Scott is the subject of this encyclopaedia-style popular science book which looks at Antarctica’s unforgiving climate, inaccessibility, potential for exploration and interconnectedness with the global ecosystem. The use of mixed media, with the incorporation of old maps and photographs, ensures the book is lively and varied.

David Böhm (1982) is an artist and author of illustrated children’s books. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His collection of comic-strip tales from Africa, Ticho hrocha (The Silence of the Hippo, 2009) won 2nd place in the competition for the Most Beautiful Czech Books of the Year. He also had success with the publication Hlava v hlavě (The Head in the Head, 2013): an encyclopaedic fount of knowledge with imaginative artistic and technical explanations of the functioning of the head perched on our necks (Most Beautiful Czech Books of the Year, 2014 Magnesia Litera Award, with the poet Ondřej Buddeus). There have been numerous translations – into German, Italian, Russian, Korean, etc. – of the work Jak se dělá galerie (How to Make a Gallery, 2016), created together with a team of authors from the Moravian Gallery headed by Ondřej Chrobák. His new book is called A jako Antarktida (A is for Antarctica, 2019). The book was first published in German in 2019 by Karl Rauch Verlag.