
Kira Salak
writer + adventurer
Known as the gutsiest woman adventurer of our day, Kira Salak has traveled to some of the world’s most inhospitable places. In fact, The New York Times has called her “a tough, real life Lara Croft.”
An author at heart, Kira has also written extensively about her dangerous + determined explorations of remote reaches. Her treks and riveting accounts of them led National Geographic to name her as one of their Emerging Explorers and contributing editors. As suggested by her PEN award for journalism {earned for fearless reporting on the war in Congo}, Kira is a woman who is willing to take risks in order to bring the world stories that would otherwise remain unseen.
adventurous + gutsy spirit | has traveled to some of the most remote places in the world, accomplishing feats few people {if any} have attempted
writing + journalism | authored award-winning fiction and non-fiction inspired by her travels
1995 | first woman to cross Papua New Guinea
2002 | first person to ever kayak 600 miles down the Niger River alone
2007 | completed the 216-mile Bhutan Snowman Trek, the most difficult altitude trek in the Himalayas {more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest!}
from | to
state champion cross-country runner | doctor, writer + adventurer for National Geographic
born on
September 4, 1971
born in
Chicago, Illinois
birth name
Kira Salak
citizen of
The United States of America
daughter of
a waitress + a computer repairman
grew up in | lives in
a suburb of Chicago | the Bavarian Alps, Germany
educated at | studied with
Emerson College
~ Boston, Massachusetts | BFA ~
University of Arizona
~ Tucson, Arizona | MFA ~
University of Missouri
~ Columbia, Missouri | PhD ~
loved studying
creative writing
advocate for | influenced by
ayahuasca healing | Scottish Explorer, Mungo Park
in her spare time
hiking
kayaking
camping
image credits
Remi Benali | Kira Salak
Lana Eklund | Kira Salak
collapse bio bits"The worst thing a person can do is tell me that I can’t do something, because then I’ll want to do it all the more."
Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu | 2004
"Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion."
Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu | 2004
"I've told the world that it can do what it wants with me during this trip if only, by the end, I have learned something more."
The Cruelest Journey | november 2004
"Sleep in the Sahara and you can see every star in the graceful curve of Orion’s bow, the great sweep of the Milky Way at his back."
Libya: The Land of Cruel Deaths | 2006
"I can endure out here, in my sleeping bag, under stars too innumerable to calculate. Such an ecstasy of wonder and gratitude. I am here, I am here!"
Libya: The Land of Cruel Deaths | 2006
for further reading about Kira Salak:
curated with care by Angela Willard {august 2014}
Kira Salak in the Libyan Sahara Desert
Kira setting up camp on her strenuous journey through the Libyan Sahara Desert. Kira paints a vivid picture for the reader in her article about Libya. She describes her nights in the desert, with unparalleled awe ~ "I discover that the desert has its own soul. And it isn’t insignificance that I feel in the face of this, but the aching candor of being alive. These great dunes around me—carved and shaped by the wind, baked by the sun—were once stone. And if mountains can dissolve, then what of me—so much more fragile, so much softer, so quick to bleed and easy to destroy. Maybe it’s heady reflection, but I think it, lying in the sand and gazing at this world: the marvel that I am here. The marvel of it. And that is all I seem able to put into words."
Bobby Model