John H. Vaillant | |
|---|---|
 Vaillant at the 2015 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | 1962 (age 63–64) Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Nationality | Canadian/American |
John Vaillant (born 1962) is anAmerican Canadian writer and journalist whose work has appeared inThe New Yorker,The Atlantic,National Geographic, andOutside. He has written both non-fiction and fiction books.
Vaillant was born and raised inMassachusetts and has lived inVancouver since 1998.[1] He is the son of Harvard psychiatrist and social scientistGeorge Eman Vaillant and grandson of the archaeologistGeorge Clapp Vaillant. He is married to the potter, writer, and anthropologist Nora Walsh.[2]
Vaillant's first book,The Golden Spruce,[3] dealt with the felling of the Golden Spruce orKiidk'yaas onHaida Gwaii byGrant Hadwin. It was a bestseller and won a number of awards.
In 2010, he publishedThe Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival about a man-eating tiger incident that took place in 1997, in Russia'sFar EasternPrimorsky Krai, where most of the world'sAmur tigers live. It was a bestseller and won a number of awards before being translated into 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt's film company, Plan B.[citation needed]
In 2015, Vaillant publishedThe Jaguar's Children, a novel about an undocumentedMexican immigrant trapped inside the empty tank of a water truck that has been abandoned in the desert by human smugglers. The novel was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and the Kirkus Fiction Prize. It was shortlisted for the 2015Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.[4]The Jaguar's Children received positive reviews from theNew York Times andNPR.[5][6]
Vaillant's fourth book,Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast,[7] was published in 2023. It follows the events and aftermath of the2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which caused billions of dollars' worth of damage and destroyed around 2400 homes and forced the evacuation of over 80,000 people,[8] and describes the anthropological history between humans and fire, how it has shaped our societies, and how it now threatens them in the context of climate change.[7]Fire Weather came out June 6, 2023, which opinion writer David Wallace-Wells ofThe New York Times said was, “unfortunately, exquisitely timed.”[9] The book’s release coincided with the start of several days of hazardous smoke levels and a thick yellowish haze acrossthe eastern United States due to profuse smoke plumes fromCanadian wildfires that drifted south.Fire Weather was longlisted for the 2023National Book Award for Nonfiction,[10] and shortlisted for the 2023Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[11] It was awarded Britain's £50,000Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in November 2023.[12]
Vaillant is the author of these books:
