Image courtesy of Bruce Kirkby
Bruce Kirkby had fallen into a pattern of looking mindlessly at his phone for hours, flipping between emails and social media, ignoring his children and wife and everything alive in his world, when a thought struck him. This wasn't living; this wasn't him. This moment of clarity started a chain reaction which ended with a grand plan: he was going to take his wife and two young sons, jump on a freighter and head for the Himalaya. A warm and unforgettable portrait of a family letting go of the known world to encounter an unfamiliar one filled with rich possibilities and new understandings.
Bruce’s presentation will be followed by an interview with award winning Canadian writer John Vaillant.
Festival books including Bruce Kirkby's Blue Sky Kingdom can be bought at Pages Book Store at the Virtual Mountain Marketplace.
Program subject to change
Related People
Kirkby, Bruce
BRUCE KIRKBY is a wilderness writer and adventure photographer. His journeys include the first modern crossing of Arabia’s Empty Quarter by camel, a descent of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge by raft, a sea kayak traverse of Borneo’s northern coast and a coast-to-coast Icelandic trek. A columnist for The Globe and Mail, Kirkby has also written for The New York Times, Outside magazine and Canadian Geographic. He makes his home in Kimberley, B.C.
Vaillant, John
John Vaillant is a 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 Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction. His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Non-Fiction, was selected for Canada Reads, and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. His latest book and first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Knopf), was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He is currently working on a non-fiction book about fire.