Due to be published by Akoya, September 2026
In 2020, Ilona Wiśniewska spent three months in Greenland’s northernmost settlements of Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk during the polar night, the time of year when the sun does not rise. The few hundred inhabitants of these towns live according to the rules determined by nature and their ancestors, great hunters of walrus and bear. Glimmer: From the Outskirts of Greenland is an account of Wiśniewska’s time spent among the Inughuit people, who invited her into their lives, their kitchens and conversations, and allowed her to participate in their hunting trips.
Wiśniewska is a photographer and writer specialising in reportage of the territories of northern Europe. She lives in northern Norway. Glimmer is her fourth book of reportage, and her second on Greenland; she has also written one children’s book. With her characteristic open-mindedness, empathy and inquisitiveness, Wiśniewska set out to meet, observe and write about one of the last remaining indigenous hunting groups of the North, a group that is rapidly diminishing in number. She sought neither to judge them, nor to be shocked by their customs. Instead, she was shocked by the level of shame she felt: for those ‘Westerners’ who had been there before her, for those who would come after, and for herself. She became acutely aware that she was also describing, simplifying and overinterpreting, decontextualising. At the same time, she acknowledged that text was a tool at her disposal, while the tool of the Inughuit was the story (their language has no written form).
As she gradually gained the locals’ trust, and with their permission, she felt able to combine the forces of both tools, using her text to tell a part of their story: one of survival, of a strong attachment to the earth, and of the climate catastrophe and political issues that are contributing to the depopulation of those areas. Glimmer won the Grand Press Award for Reportage Book of the Year 2022. It was shortlisted for the Nike Literary Award 2023, the Ryszard Kapuściński Award 2023, and the Beata Pawlak Award 2022.