David Quammen

David Quammen is an American writer born in 1948 and raised near Cincinnati. After studying at Yale and Oxford, he moved to Montana in 1973. He began as a novelist, then became widely known for nonfiction through a fifteen-year column for Outside and later work for National Geographic and other magazines.

His books bring together field reporting, scientific history and encounters with researchers. Evolution and extinction recur throughout his work, as do the pressures human activity places on wild landscapes. In Spillover and Breathless, he turns that attention to viruses crossing between animals and people; The Tangled Tree follows discoveries that complicated the familiar branching picture of evolution.

The Song of the Dodo, published in 1996, investigates island biogeography and what islands reveal about evolution, ecological isolation and extinction. Quammen connects places such as the Galápagos, Madagascar and Komodo with fragmented mainland habitats that increasingly function like islands. The book received the John Burroughs Medal, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award and Britain’s BP Natural World Book Prize. Quammen is also a three-time National Magazine Award winner, while Breathless was a 2022 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction.

Start with The Song of the Dodo. It offers the fullest introduction to his characteristic method: a large scientific argument built through travel, biography, history and close attention to species under pressure.