David Quammen

David Quammen (born February 24, 1948) is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals. He is also a science communicator.

A collection of Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856 to 2014.

Early life and education David Quammen was born on February 24, 1948, to W.A. and Mary Quammen. He was raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from St. Xavier High School in 1966. He attended and graduated from Yale University. In 1970 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, enabling him to study at University of Oxford.

During his graduate work at Oxford, he studied literature, concentrating on the works of American writer William Faulkner. After completing his education and publishing his first novel, he relocated to Bozeman, Montana. He has continued to live there with his wife, Betsy (Gaines) Quammen, a conservation activist.

In 1981, Quammen began writing columns for Outside Magazine, and continued for fifteen years. Some of the columns from Outside Magazine and others contributed to Quammen's nonfiction books: Natural Acts (1985), The Flight of the Iguana (1988), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (1998), and The Boilerplate Rhino (2000). and a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction in 1997. given by the National Association of Science Writers, and the Royal Society of Biology (UK) Book Award in General Biology. In 2013, Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The Song of the Dodo (Scribner, 1996), a study of the bird's extinction won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. Quammen, David. The Zolta Configuration. New York: Doubleday Books, 1983. Quammen, David. To Walk the Line. New York: Pocket Books, 1985. Quammen, David. The Soul of Viktor Tronko. New York: Dell,1987. Quammen, David. Blood Line: Stories of Father and Sons. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1988.

Awards and accolades

1970 Rhodes Scholarship 1987 National Magazine Award 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship 1994 National Magazine Award 1996 Natural World Book Prize 1997 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism 1997 Lannan Foundation Fellowship 2000 Honorary doctorate from Montana State University 2001 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay for The Boilerplate Rhino 2005 National Magazine Award 2012 The Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, finalist for Spillover 2013 Science in Society Book Award, for Spillover 2013 Royal Society of Biology (UK) Book Award in General Biology, for Spillover