Harry Whitehead's White Road is shortlisted for the 2026 Adventure Writing Prize. 

About the Book: 

Only one knows the truth. Only one can reveal it. Only one can save them all.

An oil rig explodes in the High Arctic just as winter's setting in, catalysing an environmental disaster.

Carrie is a Scottish ex-Navy rescue swimmer out of her depth in the High Arctic. Ross, the owner of an oil rig, has a guilty conscience. Amaruq, an Inuvialuit oil-rig worker, is caught between two worlds.

Stranded on the Arctic ice with a half-dead stranger, Carrie's stalked by a starving polar bear. Ross and Amaruq face their own crossroads as lives hang on their decisions.

From the Arctic wastes to the corporate backrooms of shady Big Oil, White Road is an authentic and gripping eco-thriller of survival, battled out at the edge of everything.

An Interview with the Author: 

WNSF: Congratulations on being selected for the 2026 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize shortlist! What does adventure writing mean to you? Would you have considered yourself an adventure writer before being shortlisted for the Prize?

Harry: I want to go on an adventure when I’m writing, to be ‘off and gone away’. In my first novel, The Cannibal Spirit, I got lost in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia. The novel I recently completed, Finding Soso, is a chase across the Caucasus in 1905, but also spends time on an oil tanker in a hurricane at sea and the Sumatran jungles. The novel I’m writing now, The High Places of the World, is an adventure into the remote Himalayas. The only novel I wrote that didn’t work out was titled – I kid you not! – Nowhere. So, adventure writing to me involves some sense of a place journeyed through and to, and that place playing a central role in a story. You put together a world map showing all the places the different longlisted novels could take you – it was so thrilling to see.

WNSF: Thank you! We're glad you enjoyed it! Are there any particular books or authors which have made a lasting impact on you? 

Harry: That’s a hard question to ask a writer. So many (and I had to cut this answer short)! I grew up reading tales of adventure – Wilbur Smith (Hungry as the Sea!), Ursula Le Guin, Alastair McLean, Susan Cooper, James Clavell, Alan Garner, Anne McAffrey. Cormac McCarthy’s work was very influential when I was getting started as a writer, as was Joseph Conrad. I come back to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient every couple of years. I’ve read Patrick O’Brian’s ‘Master and Commander’ novels countless times. Every Jane Austen, equally (adventures in Regency England). Tim Gautreaux’s Louisiana Cajun short stories. Percival Everett and Charlotte McConaghy, John Le Carré, Mick Herron. My PG Wodehouse novels are in shreds. I love novels that offer ‘news from elsewhere’, be it history, class, place.

Basically, I’m a reader without control – I’ll read War and Peace then Lee Child, Virginia Woolf then the latest sci-fi, Toni Morrison then The Count of Monte Cristo. Everything Russian. And I know everyone who reads this interview will already be an equally avid reader. So you know how it is, right: everywhere you look there’s something you simply MUST read! I feel like that with this short-list – another five books on the bedside pile. 

WNSF: Can you tell us about any adventurous experiences in your life? Have they influenced you as a writer or your writing?

Harry: One way or another I’ve led an adventurous life. I lived abroad for many years in the Far East. I’ve travelled widely, spent a lot of time in India and the Himalayas. As a child my father, who I’d only see once or twice a year, used to take me with him to remote places like the Saudi Arabian Asir, the Scottish Highlands, the Moroccan Sahara. All of it informs any sense of adventure and the new in my writing.

For instance, when I was researching my first novel on Vancouver Island, I walked part of the West Coast trail with a formidably tough 75 year old woman. One day, we got stuck and had to head inland into the temperate rainforest. We became hopelessly disoriented - at one point we found ourselves twenty feet off the ground without knowing how it had happened. Eventually we came upon a strange, low trail, four feet high, meandering through the impossible undergrowth. We followed it all the way into a bear den! Luckily its resident was off visiting – we beat our way through the foliage and back to the seashore. That abrupt terror and three-dimensional disorientation played a central role in the novel.

WNSF: The Librarians and Library Staff who read, reviewed and selected your book for the shortlist wanted us to ask you some questions, too! One said: 'I loved your book! It's an eco-thriller without compromise on either the ‘eco’ or the ‘thriller’. The landscape sings; it's almost like a character - unforgiving and always changing. I would love to know how you researched this. Have you been to the Arctic? Did you visit a drill ship, because the feel of it comes through so vividly - you can smell the ozone and touch the rust.'

Harry: Thank you – that’s so lovely to know you saw the setting as like a character in the novel, which was certainly the idea!  

In all my novels, place is crucial to the wider narrative. My first, The Cannibal Spirit, is set in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia; White Road in the Arctic; my next novel, The High Places of the World, in the Himalayas. But I’m not convinced you need to visit a place in person. Tolkien never spent a long weekend in Mordor. I remember reading about Geoff Dyer trying to write a biography of DH Lawrence. He travelled to all the important locations Lawrence spent time in. Dyer stood there in each place and felt... nothing! We all have such a strong ‘Arctic imaginary’, already, don’t we? It began, maybe, with Frankenstein, the Franklin Expedition, the quest for the North Pole, and so on. It’s there in all of us now.

That said, though, I spend years reading and watching everything until I can actually genuinely see/hear/touch/taste/feel the world I’m writing. Literally see it superimposed over my normal vision. That might sound unlikely, but I only know a novel draft is going to work when there’s this constant flicker-vision of the setting tormenting my every-day. The Arctic night on the pack-ice overlays the ordinary world. I write hundreds of pages of notes, and often I cut them all up into choice phrases and words and sentences from stuff I’ve read until I have a bucket of ‘setting confetti’. I’ve even been known to chuck it in the air in my office and let it fall all round, pull random clumps of it up, read them together until my mind’s utterly filled with it. Then, of course, you have to edit almost all of it out of the story in the second draft. Writers are mostly bananas – what can I say? 

I did visit a drillship that was moored up at the town of Port Talbot in South Wales. It made the entire town look tiny. Just the most incredible experience to see so vast a construction – one that moves and floats and can be kept totally still in the ocean ten thousand feet above a wellhead on the sea floor. Amazing.

WNSF: Another asked: 'There is a lot of technical detail in the book about oil wells (and I enjoyed the glossary). How much research did you need to do?'

Harry: Years! I got started in about 2014. And you don’t exactly Google ‘how to blow up an oil rig’! The men in black balaclavas will beat your front door in and march you off to the cells. So I had to learn all about how rigs function, read up on all the previous disasters, think through how this disaster might unfold. I had to learn about oil business finance – on and on and on. And then, of course, cut 99% of it out of the novel or I’d bore my poor readers senseless. Just enough to make sense, hopefully! Fortunately, I’d always had a hankering to learn about oil – the black blood in our global civilization’s veins. And, tree hugger though I am, I fell in love with the technology. There’s never been anything on its scale in all of history. So it was a real joy to do the research (and of course all about the Arctic too, which I talk about in answer to another question). All my books, at least in part, begin with a subject I’m fascinated by and want to learn more about.

I gave a talk called ‘How To Blow Up An Oil Rig’ a few years ago at the British Library. All the more usual type of library users attended. But, just before I started, a fit looking guy in a conservative blue suit marched in and sat at the back with a notebook. He stared meaningfully at me throughout my talk, notebook and pen in hand, and then left as soon as it was finished. My subject matter had obviously pinged at GCHQ! But it seems he decided I wasn’t going to spill any nationally-sensitive beans, after all.

WNSF: Lastly, 'The scenes with the polar bear were some of the most exciting scenes in the book. However, I found it quite difficult reading about the polar bear attacks and wasn't sure whose side I was on. It was clear that the character, Carrie, also had sympathy for the bear.  Did you find it hard to write having to be mean to the polar bear? Was it difficult to decide on the bear’s fate?'

Harry: Thank you so much for bringing up the bear! Polar bears get a bad rap – they’re either vulnerable and endangered, and we feel bad for them, or they’re ferocious killers we must defend ourselves from. And it is true that if a polar bear and a human meet then most likely it ain’t gonna be pretty! But I’m with the bear: we’re essentially undertaking a home invasion when we meet them out on the ice-pack – unless you’re an Inuit, of course. But if we end up as dinner, fair dos. I tried to make the bear a genuine character in the novel. I wanted to make sure I didn’t make the story obvious in its “BEAR ATTACK!” moments (and I don’t want to offer spoilers here). But, just to say, when Carrie put the rifle sight to her eye that first time and gazed across those hundreds of yards at the bear, I had no idea what she was going to do. And Carrie led me – it was her decision! How things end? It had to be the way it was...

WNSF: Speaking of Carrie, we hear she's partly based on a real person?

Harry: Yes! My protagonist, Carrie Essler, was partly inspired by Sara Faulkner, the first woman to become a US Coast Guard rescue swimmer. I heard an interview with her when she described her epic struggles to succeed in so macho a working environment. An incredible story of courage and strength that helped me formulate and understand Carrie’s life.

WNSF: What would you consider to be the upsides, and the downsides, of being an author?

Harry: The hardest issue always for me is routine – it takes a week or two to get me up and running and inside my story if I’ve had time away from it. And unless you’re very successful, you have to have a second paying gig of some kind. So I’m always being dragged away from the story to pay the bills. But there’s no addiction quite like writing fiction, for me. If I’m not doing it, I’m craving it. The upside, then, is the enormous rush when your world is built, your players cast, the plot’s thorny questions clear, and ‘the game is afoot’.

WNSF: What has been your toughest criticism as a writer? And your greatest compliment? 

Harry: My novelist wife crosses out whole pages of my draft work and writes ‘Blah Blah’ in the margin. There are times I want to snap all her pencils and write ‘Raspberries to you’ on the bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, of course, she’s generally right. 

My greatest compliment is probably the oil business engineer who offered White Road his technical expertise, despite knowing me for a ‘polar bear hugger’ and worried I’d misrepresent his beloved industry. I was very nervous when I wrote to tell him the book had been published – had I offered a balanced account? But he called White Road a ‘superb read’, even as the naturalist Mark Cocker described it as a ‘love-letter’ to the endangered Arctic. So maybe I did get the balance right. I wanted to show the reality of all the worlds I was writing about.

Buy the Book:

About the Author: 

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and teaches creative writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the annual free literature festival, Literary Leicester.

Before this, he lived in the Far East and then worked in the UK film business.  

His debut novel, The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin Canada) was reviewed as ‘powerful, brave, ambitious’ (The Globe and Mail), ‘a thriller with a Joseph Conradian plot’ (The Walrus), and ‘a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive’ (Quill and Quire).

His latest novel, White Road, is a gritty eco-thriller set in the High Arctic. It is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook formats.

What Our Reviewers Said:

"Goodness, I loved this book! A page turnrning mix of eco-thriller and a story of human endurance against incredible odds. The characters are fleshed out, and the threat facing both the individual and the environment from a misguided eco terrorist's actions feel palpably real."

"Did I have any choice other than to get on board? Nope. Was I carried through the early chapters? I defy anyone not to be! Did it hook me? Oh yes! Adventure in every sense, with thrilling obstacles, both man made and natural, for the protagonist to overcome."