LANDS OF LOST BORDERS
Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.
• Globe and Mail bestseller in Canada
• September 2018 Indie Next Pick selection in the USA
• Winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2019 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Literary Nonfiction
• Winner of the 2019 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2019 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature
• Winner of a 2019 OpenBook Award in Taiwan
• Winner of the 2018 Banff Mountain Book Award for Adventure Travel
• Published in Canada by Knopf Canada and the US/UK/Australia/NZ by HarperCollins, with translated editions in Germany (Auf der Seidenstraße/Piper), France (Sur les Terres des Frontières Perdues/Editions Artaud), China (ThinKingdom Media), and Taiwan (無界之疆, New Century Publishing Co., Ltd).
BACK COVER
“As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved—that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher—had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.
To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end.
Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.”
RELATED Photos & VIDEOS
Silver medals at elementary school science fairs are excellent predictors of a glorious future in adventure. The more serious the photo, the wilder the wandering to come. Melissa “Mel” Yule and Kate in 1993.
Looking giddy and pale with sunscreen in Leh, India, here we are (Kate and Mel) after getting off our bikes for the very last time on the Silk Road, 2011.
Check out more photos from the Silk Road.
Here’s a video we threw together with iMovie featuring 10 months, 10 countries, & 10,000 km of our 2011 Silk Road bike ride...in roughly 10 minutes.
Here’s another Kate & Mel iMovie documentary special, this time about our first bike ride on the Silk Road in 2006. Alas, we never got around to making episodes 2 or 3.
Buzz
“As a young girl growing up in rural Canada, Harris dreamed of the far-off lands Marco Polo described, igniting an obsession with the world beyond the farthest bend in the road. Lands of Lost Borders is the gift Harris sends back from that beyond... With elegant, sensitive prose, she takes the reader along on her travels, shares her passion with infectious enthusiasm and invites us into her heart... That she is able to cast and maintain such a spell of wonder is no small feat. To say that Harris has become the explorer she always wanted to be is the highest praise I can think to offer.”
“Extraordinary. . . Lands of Lost Borders is rich not only because of the adventures it recounts, but in the telling of them. It isn’t so much a travelogue as it is a contemplation of what pushes us out the door and how we change out there in the world before we return to our own little corner of it. . . You find yourself wanting to linger, rereading passages built of sentences so beautiful they demand to be read out loud – even if no one else is in the room.”
“Lands of Lost Borders is a compelling, suspenseful, insightful and elegant travel memoir. . . The book’s title is a metaphor, of course. History and self and place all get mixed into an expression of an explorer’s desire. This is one that will have you dreaming.”
“Beautifully written, a vivid conjuring of landscapes most readers have never seen. . . So many adventure memoirs detail seemingly superhuman feats of endurance that are off-limits to most mortals. Harris, instead, suggests that anyone can become an explorer simply by taking a long walk—or a bike ride—and paying close attention to the world as it passes by. . . [A] fresh new voice on what it means to be an explorer in the 21st century.”
“Harris’ stunning and nuanced prose limns sweeping landscapes and offers engaging history lessons—all while maintaining a brilliant self-awareness and authenticity. Vivid, pithy descriptions read like indelible poetry, exemplifying Harris’ reverence for the interconnectedness of our world. Lands of Lost Borders is illuminating, heart-warming, and hopeful in its suggestion that we will explore not to conquer but to connect.”
“[A] journey that beautifully reveals much about the history and nature of exploration itself. Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking.”
“[In this] luminous, incisive memoir, Harris chronicles her permanent wanderlust, her twisting career path and the months she spent cycling the Silk Road with her best friend. Lyrical, brilliant and sharply observed, Lands of Lost Borders is a paean to wanderlust and a call for readers to launch their own explorations.”
“From her vantage point of a student of the history of science, explorer and adventurer, Kate Harris presents a rare and unique vision of world, and explores the nature of boundaries. Unable to realize her childhood dream of travelling to Mars, she decides to trace Marco Polo’s Silk Road by bicycle. Vivid descriptions of the places and people she meets inspire deep and eclectic reflections on the nature of the world, wilderness, and the struggle of humans to define and limit them. This is a book that changes how one thinks about the world and the human compulsion to define it.”
“This is so much more than a travelogue; in sharing her adventure biking the Silk Road, Kate Harris gives us a meditation on both our yearning to explore and that darker impulse to divide ourselves into walled-off nations. Lands of Lost Borders is a rhapsodic, deeply researched, and elegantly written book. I cannot wait to see where this writer goes next.”
“Few have the guts or the stamina to bicycle the famed Silk Road, the ancient route of Marco Polo. Fewer still possess the considerable talent of Kate Harris that allowed her to write of her adventures. . . Harris shares her experiences, but she also explores the very concept of borders, both personal as well as geographic.”
“Beautifully rendered [debut]... Harris’s talent is in her prose, as she offers breathtaking descriptions of the Silk Road, shrouded in mystery and wonder.”
“Kate Harris arrives among us like a meteor—a hurtling intelligence, inquiring into the nature of political borders and the meaning of crossing over. The honesty behind her self-doubt, her championing of simple human friendship, and her sheer determination to explore what she does not know, compel you to travel happily alongside her in Lands of Lost Borders.”
“Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven’t felt for years. It’s a modern classic.”
Bio
Forever ridiculous in Piccadilly. Image credit: Joanne Ratajczak
I’m a writer with a knack for getting lost. My first book, Lands of Lost Borders, about biking the Silk Road instead of going to Mars, was a national bestseller that won several awards for literary nonfiction. It has been translated into multiple languages. When not wandering the world on ill-advised expeditions (exhibit A, B, C, D), or as part of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team, I live off-grid in a cabin on Taku River Tlingit territory in Atlin, British Columbia. I also spend a few months each year in Toronto for my wife’s job, where we delight in the temporary perks of hot showers, indoor plumbing, and vast libraries. These days I’m working on a second book and learning how to fly a small plane: guess which is harder.
Why write?
As Virginia Woolf put it,
"That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it may lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly."
Or from Robert Bly's perspective,
“If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than the apples. It’s good to settle down somewhere and love poetry more than that.”
Some Publications
Confluences, Granta (2021)
The Many Lives of Wayne Merry, Alpinist Magazine (2020).
Why the World Needs Barry Lopez, Outside (2019).
The End of Exploration, The Walrus (2019); finalist for Short Feature Writing in 2020 National Magazine Awards.
The Future of Exploration, The Walrus (2018).
Lands of Lost Borders, The Georgia Review (2014); “notable” selection in Best American Travel Writing 2015.
Tuktoyaktuk or Bust, The Walrus (2014).
The Contours of Cold, CutBank (2012); “notable” selection in Best American Essays 2013.
Solute and isotope geochemistry of subsurface ice melt seeps in Antarctica, Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Microbial communities at the borehole observatory on the Costa Rica Rift flank, Frontiers in Microbiology.
