2015 Presentation: John Vaillant

Canadian writer John Vaillant has penned bestselling nonfiction books, fascinating long-form magazine pieces and, most recently, a well-received novel. His first nonfiction book, The Golden Spruce, recounts a logger-turned-activist’s baffling act of protest in British Columbia, and his second, The Tiger, unfurls a tense true story of a man-eating tiger in Russia’s far east.

His first novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was released in January. With this book, Vaillant turns his attention south, to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where he unspools a page-turning survival story told through the eyes of Hector, a man trapped inside a tanker truck during an illegal border crossing. Along with shining a spotlight on one of America’s most controversial issues, Vaillant’s book elucidates the dangers of illegal crossings and brings into focus the human lives of those who dare to try it. NPR calls The Jaguar’s Children “an extraordinary feat of literary ventriloquism.”

Vaillant is also a traveler whose work in journalism and other fields has taken taken him to five continents and five oceans. He has homesteaded in Alaska, fished in the Bering Sea, sailed to Hawaii, taught learning-disabled children, skied across the Beartooth Mountains, pursued vampires in Transylvania, swam with beluga whales in Hudson’s Bay, played slide guitar and sung for money, crossed the Rockies on horseback, hopped trains, gotten drunk at a Romanian shepherds’ convention and led workshops with people who range from convicts to corporate executives on issues of race, gender and globalization.