Alanna Mitchell

An award-winning science journalist, book author and playwright in Toronto, Alanna Mitchell has birdwatched on every continent. A highlight was an hour monitoring an elusive, massive harpy eagle as it tended its nest deep in the forests of Suriname. More recently she spotted a delicate, red-beaked Austral rail, thought extinct for much of the last century, in Patagonia. Her biologist father organized elaborate Christmas Bird Count rituals every year of her childhood on Canada’s prairies, and she never missed them, binoculars at the ready, parka and knit cap firmly in place, glasses freezing up. Her most recent book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, won the prestigious Grantham Prize for excellence in environmental journalism.