BRUCE KIRKBY / WRITING

Stories from around the globe

Three bestselling books. Decades of journalism. Adventure, wilderness, family and remarkable encounters.

Published in The New York Times, Outside, Canadian Geographic and The Globe and Mail.

01 / THE BOOKS

Sand Dance

By Camel Across Arabia's Great Southern Desert

For forty days and forty nights during the winter of 1999, Bruce Kirkby and his team travelled by camel across Arabia’s great southern desert – the legendary Empty Quarter. Journeying from Salala in Oman on the Arabian Sea, they headed north and east for 1,200 kilometres across remote and largely unexplored desert wilderness, where ranges of sand dunes tower to over three hundred metres in height. When they finally reached Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf, they were received as heroes. Theirs was the first camel crossing of the Empty Quarter in over fifty years

Now Bruce Kirkby has written a thoughtful and deeply felt account of this challenging expedition – and has illustrated it with twenty-four pages of his stunning colour photographs.

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A Decade in Search of Adventure

Dolphin's Tooth

Stuck in an engineer’s cubicle, dutifully beginning the responsible adult life he was raised to undertake, Kirkby is tormented by doubts and boredom. In a fit of rebellion, he quits his job to bicycle the Karakoram Highway in northern Pakistan. He is twenty-two and absolutely clueless. Miraculously, hilariously, he survives — and discovers his life’s passion.

Over the next fifteen years, Kirkby navigates an evermore uncertain and uncommon path, honing his skills on some of the most challenging expeditions the world has to offer. Whether it’s gun fights and crocodile attacks while running Africa’s Blue Nile Gorge, the rescue of a fallen sherpa on Mount Everest, evading capture in Myanmar’s forbidden tropical paradise, or learning to embrace the wilderness on the Tatshenshini River of Canada’s Arctic, Kirkby shares with the reader the excitement, doubts, insights, and even the uncomfortable self-knowledge that a life lived on the edge brings.

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A Family Adventure to the Heart of the Himalaya

Blue Sky Kingdom

One morning at breakfast, while gawking at his phone and feeling increasingly disconnected from family and everything else of importance in his world, it strikes writer Bruce Kirkby: this isn’t how he wants to live.

Within days, plans begin to take shape. Bruce, his wife Christine, and their two children—seven-year-old Bodi and three-year-old Taj—will cross the Pacific by container ship, then travel onward through South Korea, China, India and Nepal aboard bus, riverboat and train, eventually traversing the Himalaya by foot. Their destination: a thousand-year-old Buddhist monastery in the remote Zanskar valley, one of the last places where Tibetan Buddhism is still practised freely in its original setting.

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02 / ESSAYS FEATURES JOURNALISM