The Owner of the Sea: Three Inuit Stories Retold

A The Scotsman Book of the Year 2021. In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is ’brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy’: precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture. Here we learn of ’Sedna the Sea Goddess’ and ’Kiviuq the Hunter’, the central protagonists of the book’s remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna’s world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from... well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. ’The Old Woman Who Changed Herself into a Man’, a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.

Richard Price has published over a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993, including Lucky Day (2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Since then, every Carcanet collection he has published has been shortlisted for a major prize. In 2012 his poem ’Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent Team GB in the Olympics project ’The Written World.’ A year later, Small World won the Creative Scotland Award in his home country. It was followed by another Guardian Book of the Year, Moon for Sale (2017). Nancy Campbell is a Scottish poet and non-fiction writer whose books include The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate, Disko Bay, Navigations, and How To Say ’I Love You’ In Greenlandic (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award). Between 2010 and 2017 she undertook a series of residencies with Arctic museums to research cultural shifts and climate crisis in the north. More recently Nancy has worked on commissions closer to home as the UK Canal Laureate, and as Literature Fellow at Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Germany.