John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Knopf, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General’s and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction. His second non-fiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Non-Fiction, was a bestseller selected for Canada Reads, and has been published in 17 languages.
In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar’s Children, which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Vaillant’s latest book, Fire Weather, is a #1 national bestseller that won Britain’s Baillie Gifford Prize, a global prize for English language non-fiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the U.S. National Book Award, the PEN John Kenneth Galbraith Non-Fiction Award, the Writers‘ Trust Nonfiction Prize, and Britain’s Wainwright Prize. It was named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The New York Times, among many other prominent publications.
In Canada, Fire Weather won the Shaughnessy-Cohen Prize for Political Writing, the Dafoe Book Prize, and the Hubert Evans Prize for Non-Fiction, and is currently a finalist for the Lane Anderson Award. Of particular interest to Canadians may be that Fire Weather was heartily recommended on twitter by both Catherine McKenna and Andrew MacDougall (Stephen Harper’s former head of comms).