Kate Harris is a writer and adventurer with a knack for getting lost. Named one of Canada’s top modern-day explorers, her award-winning nature and travel writing has been featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic Travel, Sidetracked, and The Georgia Review, and cited in Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Her debut memoir, Lands of Lost Borders, about biking the Silk Road, was a #1 National Bestseller, the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, the Banff Mountain Book Competition’s Adventure Travel Award, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.

Harris has degrees in science from MIT and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the history of science from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar. Harris is currently working on her second book, Practical Experiments in Soaring, about putting down roots while learning to fly. When she isn’t away on expeditions, or reporting on UN environmental negotiations for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Harris lives off-grid in a log cabin near the Yukon, British Columbia, Alaska border.

LAND OF LOST BORDERS

As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved—that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician—had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole Earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars instead.

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 into 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 most 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.

Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

DIVE DEEPER

Features:

• “Kate Harris travelled 10,000 km through 10 countries across the Silk Road, then wrote a book about it” — CBC.ca
• “In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road” — Globe and Mail
• “Kate Harris wins $30K RBC Taylor Prize for travel memoir Lands of Lost Borders” — CBC.ca
• “Kate Harris wins prestigious Edna Staebler Award” — The Record

Interview:

• “Kate Harris: ‘Children can’t understand why we don’t make dramatic changes to save the world” — The Guardian

BIONIC FUEL RECOMMENDED BY KATE

Available at the pop up bookstore during the conference or at Shelf Life Books