John Vaillant

What Happened Next: a podcast about newish books

My guest on this first episode of The Walrus era is John Vaillant. John is a Vancouver author and journalist whose acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. John has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and... The Walrus. John’s most recent book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, which was published by Knopf Canada in 2023. Fire Weather was a national bestseller, and won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize For Political Writing, the Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction, and the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize, a National Book Award, the Hubert Evans Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize. The Guardian called the book “an urgent warning—and an all-consuming read.”

John and I talk about how the devastating things he writes about in Fire Weather really are our new reality, about the fact that he is still talking publicly about the book almost every single day—even a year after it was published—and about why the novel he had been planning to write instead of Fire Weather will probably remain unwritten.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.