David Quammen

David Quammen is an author and journalist whose eighteen books include Breathless (2022), The Tangled Tree (2018), Spillover (2012), The Song of the Dodo (1996) and, most recently, The Heartbeat of the Wild (2023). Though he began his career as a novelist (To Walk the Line, 1970, and three other works of fiction), in recent decades he has written only nonfiction, focused mainly on science, history of science, and the relationships of humans to landscape and biological diversity. In the past forty years Quammen has also published a few hundred pieces of short nonfiction—feature articles, essays, columns—in magazines such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Outside, Esquire, The Atlantic, Powder, and Rolling Stone.  He writes occasional Op Eds for The New York Times and other newspapers, and book reviews for The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books.  Quammen has been honored with an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award. His books have received various awards, and Breathless in 2022 was a finalist for the National Book Award.  He lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen (also an author: American Zion and the forthcoming True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America) and their family of three dogs, a cat, and a python.