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A “meticulously researched, thrillingly told” account of a devastating wildfire in Canada has won this year’s Baillie Gifford prize, the UK’s leading award for non-fiction.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by the US-Canadian author John Vaillant was announced as the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony at the Science Museum in London on Thursday.
Published this year, the book chronicles an apocalyptic fire that began in forests close to Fort McMurray in the northern province of Alberta in May 2016 before engulfing the city itself.
The flames — so intense that they created hurricane-force winds and lightning strikes — raged for a month, burning nearly 580,000 hectares of land and forcing more than 90,000 people to evacuate. The disaster has been assessed as the costliest in Canadian history.
As Vaillant writes, the grim irony of the fire was that Fort McMurray, “an island of industry in an ocean of trees”, relies for its economy on Alberta’s tar sands nearby. As a result, the area is intimately bound up with the carbon-extracting, climate-heating forces that consumed much of it.
In recent months, Baillie Gifford, which has sponsored the prize since 2016, become engulfed in controversy over fossil fuel investments. This summer, climate activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which it also sponsors, accusing the asset manager of “greenwashing”.
Baillie Gifford disputes the charge, arguing that only a small percentage of its funds are invested in companies involved in fossil-fuel activities — lower than the market average. Nonetheless, high-profile authors have threatened to boycott the festival in future unless the group divests from fossil fuels entirely.
Describing Fire Weather as “an extraordinary and elegantly rendered account of a terrifying climate disaster that engulfed a community and industry”, the jury praised Vaillant for “forc[ing] readers to engage with one of the most urgent issues of our time”.
Vaillant, who was born in Massachusetts in 1962 and is now based in Vancouver, is the author of two award-winning works of non-fiction, The Golden Spruce (2005) and The Tiger (2010), both North American bestsellers.
According to the Financial Times review, “Vaillant tells his story at disaster-movie pace, starting with the glimpse of smoke on the horizon and assurances from the authorities that all will be fine in suburbia. Mounting doom follows.”
The Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction was founded in 1999 and originally named after the 18th-century author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson.
Previous winners include Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. It is open to books on current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
Chaired by FT literary editor Frederick Studemann, this year’s judges were historians Andrea Wulf and Ruth Scurr; Guardian theatre critic Arifa Akbar; journalist Tanjil Rashid; and Andy Haldane, chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts and an FT contributing editor.
The five other books on the 2023 shortlist were Hannah Barnes’s Time to Think, an account of the Tavistock gender clinic in London; Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, a study of the long shadow of China’s Cultural Revolution; Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring, an account of a turning point in 19th-century European history; Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo, which explores musical responses to the Holocaust; and Jennifer Homans’s Mr. B, a biography of choreographer George Balanchine. Each wins £5,000.
