Sara Wheeler was born and brought up in
Bristol, England, and studied Classics and Modern Languages at
Brasenose College,
University of Oxford. After writing about her travels on the Greek island of
Euboea and in
Chile, she was accepted by the
US National Science Foundation as their first female writer-in-residence at the
South Pole, and spent seven months in
Antarctica. In her resultant book,
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain's bunk in
Scott's Hut. While in Antarctica, Wheeler read
The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the
Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author,
Apsley Cherry-Garrard. In 1999, Wheeler was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009, she served as Trustee of the
London Library. She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book
The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the
Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts". In a 2012
BBC Radio 4 series titled
To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th century:
Fanny Trollope,
Fanny Kemble,
Harriet Martineau,
Rebecca Burlend,
Isabella Bird, and
Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them. In 2023, Wheeler published
Glowing Still, a collection of essays based on her travels, and her reflections on how the world has changed in her lifetime. ==Travel books==