Alaska author Seth Kantner wins National Outdoor Book Award

Alaska author Seth Kantner has earned a National Outdoor Book Award for “A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou.”

Kantner, who won in the Natural History Literature category, lives in Northwest Alaska.

The lives of caribou in Kantner’s home region provide the framework for the book, which includes elements of a memoir and a work of philosophy, cinched together with a rope of natural history.

His debut novel “Ordinary Wolves,” published in 2004, earned the author the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.

[Seth Kantner’s latest: A masterwork of northern observations and reflections on a life close to nature]

The book was published in 2021 by Mountaineers Books.

A release by the National Outdoor Book Awards described the award-winning work:

“It’s about a life of subsistence — a life that had sustained native Alaskans, the Iñupiat, for centuries. The hunting of caribou was central to their existence, and consequently there are frequent depictions of hunting in this book. But it is also about changes over the last decades — social, political, technological — which have altered the lifestyles of those who live there.”