Rebecca PriestleyRebecca Priestley

Rebecca Priestley lives in Wellington and works as the works as a senior lecturer at Victoria University. She writes a regular science columnist for the Listener, and she was the editor of Dispatches from Continent Seven: An anthology of Antarctic science. Rebecca was born in Wellington in 1967.

Extract: Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, a memoir beginning in Wellington

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In this extract from a chapter called ‘Deep Time’ in Rebecca Priestley’s new memoir, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, Rebecca remembers her peculiar, legume-heavy, art-saturated childhood in Wellington. (And a note from the author: if anyone has a painting from Ruth Priestley’s Antarctic Dream series, Rebecca would love to hear from you.) I grew up in … Read more

It’s nature writing, Jim, but not as we know it: Rebecca Priestley reviews Annie Dillard

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Geoff Dyer loves Annie Dillard so that should be a recommendation but actually isn’t she just kind of like totally weird? Rebecca Priestley reviews the US personal essayist.  What does it feel like to be alive? What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would … Read more

The Monday excerpt: What king crabs tell us about the crisis of climate change

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As editor of the superb new collection of essays in Dispatches from Continent Seven: An anthology of Antarctic science, Rebecca Priestley has chosen wisely and wittily. Her book includes a frightening vision of natural disaster by Kathryn Smith, who examines how a rapidly warming ocean has encouraged the invasion of the complete bastards of the … Read more