Blair Braverman

Blair Braverman learned to drive a dog team in arctic Norway while still in her teens, having first gone north at ten when her father was doing research there and again for a school exchange in Lillehammer. A folk school course in dogsledding and winter survival followed, then work guiding visitors on an Alaskan glacier, then a creative nonfiction MFA at Iowa. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, published in 2016, is the memoir of that stretch of her life. Braverman ran the 2019 Iditarod and finished 36th, wrote the Tough Love advice column for Outside, appeared on Discovery's Naked and Afraid, and ran a kennel of huskies in rural Wisconsin, which she and Quince Mountain documented in Dogs on the Trail: A Year in the Life in 2021. Essays of hers have run in Esquire, Vogue and Smithsonian. Small Game, issued by Ecco in 2022, is her first novel. Four contestants on a wilderness survival programme are left to fend for themselves in the backcountry after the production behind the show falls apart.