Kira Salak

Kira Salak was born in 1971 in Chicago and pursued adventure travel with a determination that went well beyond the requirements of journalism. She was the first person to kayak solo 600 miles down the Niger River through Mali; she made the first solo female crossing of Papua New Guinea on foot; she travelled alone through Burma and then wrote about its political prisoners.

Four Corners (2001), her account of the Papua New Guinea crossing, is her most sustained book — a journey through a landscape that was genuinely dangerous (armed gangs, tropical disease, near-starvation) written with a psychological honesty that most adventure writers avoid. She was frightened throughout, and she says so. She was also transformed by the experience, and she says that too.

Her essays for National Geographic Adventure and other magazines collected in The Cruelest Journey (2005) cover the Niger kayak and other solo adventures. What distinguishes her from most adventure writers is her willingness to examine what she was running toward or away from — the journeys are physically extreme but the writing is psychologically extreme in a different way.

She later became a writer-in-residence at the University of Nevada and has spoken and written about the psychological work she undertook, including the use of ayahuasca in Peru, to understand what drove her toward danger.