As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved — that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician, with a flair for basic science and endless slogging — had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth. So she looked beyond this planet, vowing to become a scientist and go to Mars.

Well along this path, Harris set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule. This trip was just a simulacrum of exploration, she thought, not the thing itself — a little adventure to pass the time until she could launch for outer space. But somewhere in between sneaking illegally across Tibet, studying the history of science and exploration at Oxford and staring down a microscope for a doctorate at MIT, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks, leaving footprints on another planet: What she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. And where she'd felt that most intensely was on a bicycle, on a bygone trading route. So Harris quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Yule, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end. (From Knopf Canada)

Lands of Lost Borders won the $30,000 RBC Taylor Prize for nonfiction and the $10,000 Kobo Emerging Writer Award for nonfiction.

"The initial trip Mel and I did on the Silk Road was just in China and Tibet for four months. We were just wonderstruck the whole time. It was gruelling, but it was just this widening time when we were becoming who we were and discovering what we're capable of. It just felt like soaring and I think we both went back to the Silk Road thinking, 'Let's get back to that place of wonder, possibility and expansion.' Most of the Silk Road wasn't that. It was hard. It was traffic. It was rain. There was a lot of un-redeeming grinding to our days.

"I look at this second Silk Road trip and it's where I began to get a more balanced view of the world. Not just the wonder, but the harshness. Not just beauty, but the brokenness of some places and landscapes. A bunch of the Silk Road is paved over in four-lane highways and the cities are big. The brutalities that people are facing in terms of human rights along the way are severe. I wanted to be honest about that. That's the wonder and the horror of the world all laid out. Everything that makes us amazing and awful as a species is there to see on the Silk Road."