"Fire Weather"

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—award-winning author John 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. In his talk – as he did in his book, one of the most critically lauded of the past year – Vaillant will take 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.

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 Writers’ Trust awards for nonfiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Nonfiction, was a bestseller and has been published in 16 languages. In 2014, Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for nonfiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar’s Children (Knopf), which was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His latest book, Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023), is an international bestseller, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2023, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award (U.S.), and winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize (U.K.).

The Community Speaker Series is presented annually in partnership with the Sun Valley Writers Conference. Seating is limited. Registration is required to attend. More here.