Harley Rustad

My guest on this episode is Harley Rustad. Harley is an award-winning and bestselling author, journalist, and a senior editor at The Walrus magazine. Harley’s first book was Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees, published by House of Anansi in 2018. His most recent book is Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas, published in 2022 by Knopf Canada and by Harper US. Lost in the Valley of Death won the 2023 Poland Mountain Literature Festival Award for Best Non-Fiction Book and the 2023 Religion News Association Award for Nonfiction Books. The CBC named it one of the best Canadian nonfiction books of 2022. In its feature review of the book, the New York Times said that “In prose that moves like a clear river... Rustad has done what the best storytellers do: tried to track the story to its last twig and then stepped aside.”

 

Harley and I talk about why he chose to narrate the audiobook for Lost in the Valley of Death himself, what it was like to find himself on the cover over the New York Times Book Review, and why he has had such a hard time letting go of this story and starting a new book.

 

Harley Rustad: harleyrustad.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact