Canadian John Vaillant longlisted for $85K U.K. nonfiction prize for book about Fort McMurray wildfires

John Vaillant has made 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize longlist 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. To mark the occasion of the prize's 25th anniversary this year, shortlisted authors will receive £5,000, up from the £1,000 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. 

• John Vaillant's Fire Weather looks at the Fort McMurray wildfire and a 'new century of fire'

The 13 longlisted titles were 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.

Vailliant is the only Canadian to be on this year's longlist. Rounding out the list are books by German historian Katja Hoyer; Americans Jeremy Eichler, David Grann, Jennifer Homans, Tiya Miles and Nathan Thrall; Turkish American writer Daron Acemoglu; Australia's Christopher Clark; British writers Hannah Barnes, Tania Branigan and Chris van Tulleken; and a title co-authored by British American economist Daron Acemoglu and Indian American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee.

"Fire Weather is a meticulously researched, beautifully told and vitally relevant account of an environmental and industrial disaster that erupted in the heart of the giant subarctic oil sands fields of northern Canada in 2016," wrote the judges in a press statement.

"John Vaillant tells the story of a particular disaster [...] to explore the broader issues of the economics, politics and environmental aspects of the global oil industry (the petrocene age) and our relationship with and dependence on fossil fuels."

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. 

The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 8 at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and the winner will be announced on Nov. 16 at the Science Museum.