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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, writer and wildlife photographer. He was born and raised in northern Alaska and his art reflects his love for this land and the animals who live on it, and his belief in the importance of wildness left wild.
Kantner was schooled at home and attended the University of Alaska and later the University of Montana where he received a BA, with honors, in Journalism.
He's worked as a fisherman, trapper, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder and adjunct professor. His writings and photographs have appeared in Outside, Alaska Geographic, the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and in other magazines, literary journals and anthologies. He's a former columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and presently writes a bi-monthly dispatch on climate change in the Arctic for Orion magazine.
His 2004 book Ordinary Wolves was published by Milkweed Editions and won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Kantner is a Recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award in 2005 for fiction.
He lives in northwest Alaska with his wife, Stacey, and his daughter, China.
Seth Kantner's website
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Whenever we think of "Great Alaskan Novels," we invariably think of
Jack London. Did his writings influence you in Ordinary Wolves?
Very much so. Part of the reason I became a writer was Jack. He
said when you spat or pissed it crackled and froze before it hit the ground. It
never did that when I was a kid, reading Jack––it got to 78 below one time
and it never did that! But the whole world believed it did because of London.
Later, much later, I realized his descriptions of the cold and north were very good.
Plus he wrote and lived and drank a lot––things I could at least relate
somewhat to.
How authentic do you think the popular image of Alaska as the wild,
rugged, uncharted West is?
Depends on your perspective––in the Brooks Range in a storm in
midwinter, you could say it's pretty rugged. But a lot of folks come in the
summer and fall; they have GPSs and often now satellite phones. For $3.95 they
can buy detailed USGS maps of every bend in every slough. Alaska, that I knew as
a kid, is gone; the land is still here but planes fly over it relentlessly—from
my perspective—carrying everything that Americans have too.
Was it hard to imagine Cutuk’s outlook as a kid ...
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