“The world we thought we knew is changing under our feet because we changed it.… We are entering clima incognita, the unknown climate.”

—John Vaillant

John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian, among others. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world.

His latest book is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023), a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

In addition to winning the British Baillie Gifford Prize (“the non-fiction Booker”), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, and the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize, Fire Weather was a finalist for the National Book Award, ,the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and Canada’s Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It has been named one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, NPR, Slate, and Smithsonian, among many other prominent publications. The book earned Vaillant a nod as number four on MacLean’s Power List for Climate in 2024.

“Gripping…Vaillant takes readers back into the deep history of the boreal forests before thrusting us into the Beast’s fiery heart. Fire Weather is a report from the front lines of environmental cataclysm and a prediction of what more will surely come.”
—NPR

Vaillant’s first book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General’s and Writers’ Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival  (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Non-Fiction, was a bestseller selected for Canada Reads, and has been published in 16 languages. It was proclaimed a “masterpiece” by Outside: “What elevates The Tiger from adventure yarn to nonfiction classic is Vaillant’s mastery of language.”

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 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

For more information on John Vaillant, please follow him on Twitter and at johnvaillant.com.