logo
Vaillantauthor

John Vaillant

4.50

Average rating

1

Books

John Vaillant (born June 4, 1962) is an American-Canadian writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside. He has written both non-fiction and fiction books. Vaillant was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in Vancouver since 1998. He is the son of Harvard psychologist George Eman Vaillant and grandson of the famed anthropologist George Clapp Vaillant.

His first book, The Golden Spruce, dealt with the feeling of the Golden Spruce or Kiidk'yaas on Haida Gwaii by Grant Hadwin. His 2010 work, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, is about a man-eating tiger incident that happened in the 1990s in Russia's Far Eastern Primorsky Krai, where most of the world's Amur tigers live. It is a mixture of investigative journalism, social history, geography, and natural writing. 

It won a number of awards and was selected for the 2012 edition of CBC Radio's Canada Reads, defended by lawyer and television personality Anne-France Goldwater. His next book was The Jaguar's Children (2015), a novel about an undocumented Mexican immigrant trapped inside the empty tank of a water truck that has been abandoned in the desert by human smugglers. 

The novel was a shortlisted nominee for the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The Jaguar's Children received positive reviews from the New York Times and NPR. Vaillant is known for focusing on environmental issues - such as trees in the northwest, nearly-extinct tigers, and GMO corn in Mexico - and mixing that with stories about crime or violence.

Best author’s book

pagesback-cover
4.5

The Tiger

Read