Robert Mann was born in a little log cabin which he helped his father build. As a child, he walked six miles to school through rain and snow and twice that far to go back home at the end of the day. He has made unwanted discoveries in many fields: Old Norse lore, Arthurian tales, Russian folklore, medieval Russian epic, the fiction of Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Bely and Isaac Babel. His other fictional works include The Master and Marmeladov (a satire on academe), short stories, and a novella in Russian (Zapiski Bomzha) illustrated by the talented Russian artist Aleksandr Tiumerov. The ethnographic accounts of Knud Rasmussen were the immediate inspiration for Where the Ice Never Melts. Robert Mann is a tree hugger, a whale watcher, a saviour of possums and other varmints of that sort, and a designer of polar bear rafts.