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With bestselling author Claire Cameron
In her debut memoir, bestselling author Claire Cameron confronts the rare genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.
When Cameron was nine years old, her father told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she overcame her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed in a rare predatory black bear attack in the park—an event that shocked and haunted her.
Years later, she was diagnosed with the same deadly skin cancer as her father and told to avoid exposure to UV light. Caught in another wave a grief and no longer able to venture into the wilderness, she again became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate.
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.
A Different Drummer Books will be on site with books for sale and signing after the talk.
Presented in partnership with Knopf Canada
Claire Cameron's first novel, The Line Painter, won the Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service and was nominated for an Arthur Ellis Crime Writing Award for best first novel. Her subsequent bestselling novels include The Bear, which was long-listed for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Last Neanderthal, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She is a staff writer at The Millions.
Explore Claire Cameron in our collection
If you need an accessibility accommodation during this program, please register early so we can confirm arrangements a few days before your visit.
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