Steinar Wikan

Steinar Wikan is a Norwegian zoologist and historian. He had a long career in the Sør-Varanger municipality in northeastern Norway. From 1962 to 1991 he held various positions as a teacher, museum curator, project manager and environmental protection advisor at the Svanhovd Environmental Centre in Pasvik. He has been involved in several nature conservation projects in Siberia and Russia, and in 2013 he was awarded the King’s Medal of Merit. He has published numerous scientific articles and nine monographs, including Bjørn, Ulv, Jerv: Rovviltforskning I Dag [Bear, Wolf, Wolverine: Predator Research Today] (1983) and Grensebygda Neiden: Møte Mellom Folkegrupper og Kampen om Ressursene [The Border Village of Neiden: Encounters Between Ethnic Groups and the Struggle for Resources] (1995).

An Adventurous Life »

Johan Koren, polar explorer and naturalist

Authored by: Steinar Wikan, Cathrine Harboe-Ree

Publication date: 2026

Johan Koren commenced a life of exploration at the age of 17, when he attained a position on the RV Belgica, leaving his native Norway in 1897 on an expedition to the Antarctic. Trapped by ice floes closing in around them, Koren and his fellow crew members over-wintered in the Antarctic, the first people ever to do so. An ardent naturalist by the time he became an orphan at age 11, this far-from-ordinary teenager was to grow into an extraordinary adult, participating in expeditions in the polar north and south and becoming a ship’s captain leading expeditions in northeastern Siberia and Alaska. During a period in which museums and private collectors clamoured for rare flora and fauna specimens, Koren’s personal qualities and professional expertise made him almost uniquely qualified for their pursuit. Enduring shipwrecks in the sub-Antarctic and polar north, destructive storms and the deaths of expedition companions, and surviving for a time in Siberia with assistance from local Chukchi people, Koren would eventually make important ornithological discoveries and have bird and animal species named after him by the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. An Adventurous Life is the first English language translation of Steinar Wikan’s comprehensive biographical study, published in Norwegian in 2000. Cathrine Harboe-Ree’s careful and sensitive translation will make known to the world the remarkable story of this major figure of polar exploration and zoology. ‘A fascinating reflection on the period of scientific exploration when collecting was central to the huge expansion of knowledge of the natural world taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries’. —Michael Pearson

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