Peter Heller 

Peter Heller is the national best-selling author of Celine, The Painter, The Dog Stars, and, most recently, The River (all published with Penguin Random House). The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award (previous winners include Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams). The Dog Stars received critical acclaim and was lauded as a breakout bestseller; it has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction, is a longtime contributor to NPR and Bloomberg Businessweek, and is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He lives in Denver, Colorado.