Allen Lane wins five-way auction for Dan McDougall's ‘urgent’ book on Greenland
Allen Lane has acquired award-winning journalist and documentary film-maker Dan McDougall’s A Line in the Snow: A People on the Edge of the Future, an “urgent account of Greenland and the forces reshaping our future”.
Laura Stickney, publishing director at Penguin Press, won a “hotly contested” five-way auction for acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Matilda Forbes Watson at WME. North American rights have been sold to Liveright/WW Norton, Canadian rights to McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House and German rights to Piper Verlag. Allen Lane will publish A Line in the Snow in March 2028.
The blurb reads: “Remote, sparsely populated and long overlooked, Greenland has become the frontline of the forces shaping our future. As the ice sheet loses 280bn tonnes of ice each year, Arctic shipping routes open and global powers compete for strategic influence and mineral wealth, the island is undergoing profound transformation. For Greenland’s Kalaallit communities, these converging forces are not abstract but are reshaping their daily lives.
“Drawing on more than a decade of reporting, A Line in the Snow tells the story of Greenland through 18 interconnected lives, offering an intimate portrait of a people living at the sharp edge of climate change and geopolitical rivalry. This is not a story of temporary crisis, but of a permanent reordering of the world’s margins, and what that reveals about the future awaiting us all.”
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McDougall said: “For too long, Greenland has been treated as a wilderness and a geopolitical footnote. That era is over. Yet, in the rush to lay claim to Greenland’s future, Greenlandic people have largely been written out of the narrative. This book is an attempt to write them back in. I’m proud to be publishing with Laura Stickney and the Allen Lane team, the perfect home for a book that feels like the culmination of decades spent trying to tell the stories that matter before the window to tell them closes.”
Stickney said: “Long before Greenland became a focus of global attention, Dan McDougall was reporting on the profound changes unfolding there. Drawing on years of firsthand reporting and Greenlandic voices, A Line in the Snow is an urgent, deeply human account of a place where some of the defining forces of our age are converging. We’re delighted to be publishing Dan’s first book and to welcome him to Allen Lane.”
McDougall is a former British Press Awards British Foreign Correspondent of the Year and four-time Amnesty International Media Award winner for human rights reporting. He is also the recipient of the One World Media International Journalist of the Year prize and an Royal Television Award for documentary film-making. Formerly Africa correspondent for the Sunday Times and South Asia correspondent for the Observer, he has reported from Greenland for more than a decade and written extensively on the Arctic for the Guardian. He is a media leader at the World Economic Forum and a visiting lecturer in human rights at the University of Cambridge.
