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Oxford Ministry for the Future presents The Arctic at the Crossroads

5 November 2025

You are cordially invited to attend Oxford Ministry for the Future’s next public discussion The Arctic at Crossroads with Bathsheba Demuth, Laline Paull and Joanna Kavenna, plus a panel of academics. The event promises to be an afternoon of fascinating multidisciplinary conversations about climate, history, ecology and geopolitics!
  • When: Wednesday 5 November 2025
  • Where: Levine Building Auditorium, Trinity College, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BH
  • Time: 14:00 -16:00

To register your place, please follow this link to the event page.

Read on for further details about the authors in attendance:
  • Laline Paull is a novelist and dramatist for stage and screen. Her debut novel The Bees was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, translated into 28 languages and in 2024, reissued as a Modern Classic. The Ice, her second novel, is an eco-thriller; it explores themes of friendship, power and betrayal against the backdrop of Arctic exploration, exploitation and geopolitics. Her work has been performed at the National Theatre, she is a full voting member of BAFTA and very interested in storytelling with VR.
  • Bathsheba Demuth is a writer and environmental historian specialising in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Bathsheba is interested in how the histories of people, ideas and ecologies interact. Her book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait was published in 2019 and has won numerous awards. Her writing has also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Granta and The Atlantic.
  • Joanna Kavenna is the author of several critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel Inglorious won the Orange Award for New Writing. She was fascinated for many years by Arctic places that have been called Thule, from Shetland to Iceland, Norway, Estonia and Greenland. The Ice Museum is an account of her Arctic travels, and a poetic tour through the ideas formed about these lands. Joanna’s writing has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times.