John Vaillant: Fire Weather

John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His latest book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction and a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. Through the lens of an apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that the 2016 fires at Fort McMurray were not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. 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. The book earned Vaillant a nod as number four on MacLean’s Power List for Climate in 2024.

Cosponsored by the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, the University Core Curriculum, and Environmental Studies.

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