A newly published volume from Éditions Dépaysage offers readers a unique opportunity to revisit the intellectual, artistic and human legacy of the renowned French explorer, anthropo-geographer and Arctic scholar Jean Malaurie.

Bringing together previously unpublished texts, rare writings, personal testimonies and images from his Arctic collections, the book sheds new light on a life devoted to understanding the peoples, cultures and environments of the Far North.

Entitled INUA – l’imaginaire arctique de Jean Malaurie (“INUA, Jean Malaurie’s Arctic Imaginary”) and edited by Jan Borm, the volume explores the rich connections between science, art, spirituality and Indigenous knowledge that shaped Malaurie’s work throughout more than seven decades of research and exploration.

A book with unpublished texts by and on Jean Malaurie has just been published by Éditions Dépaysage in France. Entitled INUA – l’imaginaire arctique de Jean Malaurie (“INUA, Jean Malaurie’s Arctic Imaginary”), the volume contains some of Malaurie’s writings that have been either difficult to access or unpublished in French until now. Edited by Jan Borm, it includes his remarkable preface on circumpolar art for L’Art du Grand Nord (“The Art of the Far North”), alongside testimonies from friends and close collaborators. The book also features photographs and images of objects from Malaurie’s Arctic collections, donated to the Oceanographic Institute/Foundation Albert I of Monaco. Prince Albert II of Monaco has contributed a foreword to the publication.

The book reveals the fundamentally creative dimension of an anthropo-geographer who never ceased to question the relationship between humans, animals, the Indigenous peoples of the Far North and the worlds they inhabit. A volume of remembrance and transmission, it offers a sensitive journey through Jean Malaurie’s Arctic imagination, where science, art and the sacred remain in constant dialogue.

INUA—an Inuit term referring to the spirit present in all beings and the human dimension of the animal soul—invites readers into Malaurie’s intellectual and spiritual universe. Through his texts, diaries, pastels and collected objects, together with reflections from those who accompanied him throughout his life, a holistic portrait emerges, marked by a fascination with the sacred, the visible and invisible, the mineral world and the presence of spirits.

Jan Borm (ed.), INUA: L’imaginaire arctique de Jean Malaurie, with a preface by Prince Albert II of Monaco, Éditions Dépaysage, 2026, 250 pages, €24.

Source: Malaurie Institute