David Quammen is an American author and journalist. He was honored with the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award. Quammen was born in 1948 and raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati, closely adjacent to a hardwood forest, in which he spent much of his boyhood. In 1973, after education at Yale and Oxford and the publication of one novel, he moved to Montana. He published two more spy novels in the following years and a collection of short stories, Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons, which was published in 1988. Since then he has become a nonfiction writer. Quammen published 11 nonfiction books so far, including The Spillover (2012), a work on the science, history, and human impacts of emerging diseases, which was shortlisted for eight national and international awards, and won three. More recently he has released two short books drawn from The Spillover and updated to stand alone: Ebola (2014) and The Chimp and the River (2015). In the past thirty years, he has also published a few hundred pieces of short nonfiction – feature articles, essays, columns – in magazines such as Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Esquire, The Atlantic, Powder, and Rolling Stone. He writes occasional Op Eds for The New York Times and reviews for The New York Times Book Review. He is a Contributing Writer for National Geographic, in whose service he travels often, usually to wild and remote places. He lives in Bozeman, Montana with his wife, large white dogs and a cat. Having retired from whitewater kayaking and ice hockey, he continues to bicycle and ski.
