John Vaillant has won the 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize for his book, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.
The Baillie Gifford Prize is an annual British award that celebrates the best of nonfiction written in English, presenting the winning author with £50,000 ($85,851 Cdn). To mark the occasion of the prize’s 25th anniversary this year, shortlisted authors will receive £5,000 ($8,567.10 Cdn), up from the £1,000 ($1,713.32 Cdn) they received in previous years.
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, published as Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World in the U.K., delves into the events surrounding the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the multi-billion-dollar disaster that melted vehicles, turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.
“Like millions of people around the world, I watched in horror and amazement as the entire city disappeared beneath a pyrocumulus cloud 14 kilometres high. For several days, the possibility that the entire city could be lost was real. It was clear to me then that this was a historic event with serious implications — not just for Alberta, or for Canada, but globally,” Vaillant said in an email to CBC Books earlier this year.
The winner was selected by the Financial Times’ literary editor, Frederick Studemann; author Andrea Wulf; the Guardian’s theatre critic Arifa Akbar; writer and historian Ruth Scurr; journalist and critic Tanjil Rashid; and chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, Andrew Haldane.
“Fire Weather brings together a series of harrowing human stories with science and geo-economics, in an extraordinary and elegantly rendered account of a terrifying climate disaster that engulfed a community and industry, underscoring our toxic relationship with fossil fuels,” said Studemann, chair of the jury, in a press statement.
“Moving back and forth in time, across subjects, and from the particular to the global, this meticulously researched, thrillingly told book forces readers to engage with one of the most urgent issues of our time,” he said.
Daybreak Alberta1:16:41In conversation with John Vaillant about his new book ‘Fire Weather’
Featured VideoHear Paul’s full on stage interview at Wordfest this week with John Vaillant, about his new book documenting the Fort McMurray wildfire and how fire season is changing in Alberta and around the world.
Vaillant was the only Canadian to make the shortlist.
The other titles were British author Hannah Barnes’ Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, British author Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, Australian author Christopher Clarks’ Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849, American author Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: The Scond World War, The Holocaust, and The Music of Remembrance and American author Jennifer Homans’ Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.
Vaillant is also known for his books The Golden Spruce, which won the 2005 Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction, and The Tiger, which was a contender on Canada Reads in 2012.