John Vaillant UManitoba October 29
The J.W. Dafoe Foundation Presents:
The 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize Winner
John Vaillant’s Fire Weather
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
University of Manitoba
University College, Concourse lounge
Duff Roblin Professor of Government Department of Political Studies
University of Manitoba
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John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC.
His 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, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, is the winner of the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize.
Fire Weather also won the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize and and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust 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.
Fire Weather is 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 neighbourhoods 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.
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