Alan Weisman has worked on seven continents, in the Caribbean and Oceania, and in more than 60 countries. His seventh book, Hope Dies Last, was published in April 2025 by Dutton/Penguin Random House. Author Louise Erdrich called it “a book of heroism, courage, and selfless love…. the exact book we need to fight for our place on Earth.”
His sixth book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (Little, Brown and Co., 2013) was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Paris Book Festival Prize for nonfiction, the Population Institute’s Global Media Award for best book, and was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and the Books for a Better Life Award. Booklist called Countdown “a riveting read… a major book… rigorous and provoking.”
Alan’s 2007 book The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), was a New York Times and international bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orion Book Award, the Rachel Carson Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and winner of the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Prize. In 2020, Slate named it one of the top 50 nonfiction books of the last 25 years. It was named the top nonfiction book of 2007 by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, and Canada’s National Post, and has been translated into 34 languages.
Alan is a co-founder of Homelands Productions. His radio pieces have been heard on NPR, Public Radio International, and American Public Media. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Discover, Orion, Salon, VICE, Pacific Standard, Wilson Quarterly, Lapham’s Quarterly, Condé Nast Traveler, Boston Globe Magazine, and in several anthologies including The Best American Science Writing, The Best Buddhist Writing (even though he isn’t one), A Passion for This Earth, Moral Ground, America’s Most Alarming Writer, and Going to See.
He is also the author of An Echo In My Blood (Harcourt Brace, 1999); Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998); La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico, with photographer Jay Dusard (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); and We, Immortals (Pocket Books, 1979).
Alan has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Colombia; writer-in-residence at the Altos de Chavón Escuela de Arte y Diseño in the Dominican Republic; the John Farrar Fellow in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine; a professor of writing, journalism, and Latin American studies at Prescott College and the University of Arizona (Laureate Professor of Journalism, 2003-2013); and a visiting professor at Williams College and the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá).
Among his radio awards shared with his Homelands colleagues are a Robert F. Kennedy Citation, the Harry Chapin/World Hunger Year award, and Brazil’s Prèmio Nacional de Jornalismo Radiofônico. He has also received a Four Corners Award for Best Nonfiction Book (for La Frontera), a Los Angeles Press Club Award for Best Feature Story, and a Best of the West Award in Journalism. His book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, won the 1998 Social Inventions Award from the London-based Global Ideas Bank.
Alan and his wife, sculptor Beckie Kravetz, live in western Massachusetts.