Kate Harris


Kate Harris is a Canadian author.

Early Life

Harris was born in Ontario and grew up dreaming of exploring Mars. She viewed the Earth as having been thoroughly explored and charted before her lifetime, so she set her eyes on another planet. This life-long inspiration to explore led her to bike across the Silk Road, which she documented in her first book Lands of Lost Borders.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina in the U.S, she studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lands of Lost Borders

Her first book, Lands of Lost Borders, a nonfiction book describing her experiences bicycling of Asia's historic Silk Road over a 14 month period, won the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the 2019 Edna Staebler Award. and the 2019 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. The RBC Taylor prize comes with a $30,000 cash award. The Kobo Emerging Writer's Prize and Edna Staebler Award each come with a $10,000 cash award.
She undertook the trip documented in her book with a friend.

Current works

Harris currently lives off-grid in northern British Columbia, near the Yukon border.
In an interview with Anna Maria Tremonti, of The Current, Harris described falling in love with the land around Atlin, British Columbia when she skied across the nearby Juneau Icefield as part of an undergraduate field course in glaciology. She currently shares a small cabin there with her partner.
Harris is working on a second book.

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