John Vaillant is a Vancouver-based freelance writer and author of two books of nonfiction and a novel. His first nonfiction book, The Golden Spruce, which told the story of a rare tree and the man who cut it down, received the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. Vaillant's second title The Tiger, a nonfiction book about a man-eating tiger that terrorized a village in Russia in 1997, was a national bestseller and was debated on Canada Reads in 2012. His most recent book is the novel The Jaguar's Children, which tells the story of two friends abandoned in the desert by smugglers who promised to bring them to the U.S. Vaillant's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic and other publications.