we caught up with Warwick Cairns, the celebrated writer and author of The Master Thief, who shared with us details of his past trip to Lofoten in Norway. Read on for some Scandinavian holiday inspiration.

"Way up North in Lofoten, in the Arctic North of Norway, they call it Polar Night. The sun goes down on December 7th. It doesn't come up again until nearly a month later, on January 4th."

"We spent the short days out and about. We saw eagles. We walked on snowshoes over mountains and across frozen lakes. We heard stories about trolls and their ways. In the long evenings we kicked off our snow boots, slipped on our mahabis slippers, and settled down."

"There was a sunrise: that lasted two hours. Then there was a sunset: that lasted another two. Between the sunrise and the sunset there was half an hour or so that you might call the daytime."

"The result was that the sun hung low in the sky for hours on end, and the whole landscape was bathed in all kinds of colours like you’d never seen before."

"Then of course there was the other kind of light - the one that you can see shining at night, if you’re lucky, and if you’re in the right place at the right time."

"The sky was clear and cold and sprinkled with stars, but up above there was what looked, at first, to be a long grey cloud. Except that it was glowing and shimmering in a way that clouds never do, in my experience. Then, as we watched, the grey turned slowly to green. It was the aurora. The Northern Lights. It was astonishing. And then it was gone.

 We did not see it again, after that night."

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