Early life
Kira Salak was born in 1971 in a western suburb of Chicago. Her mother was a waitress and her father repaired mainframe computers. When Salak was 13, her parents sent her to boarding school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin where she participated in cross-country activities and set a state level track record when she was 14. Though she began training for National and Olympic trials, she dropped out of the sport and decided to travel instead. Kira Salak received her B.F.A. in writing, literature and publishing from Emerson College. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) from the University of Arizona. In 2004, she graduated from the University of Missouri, with a Ph.D. in English; her two areas of specialization were 20th century American prose literature and travel literature.
Career
At the age of 24, Salak took a year off graduate school to backpack around Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Island nation, and became the first woman to cross the country. Her first book,
Four Corners: One Woman’s Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea, describes that journey. After the book was published, an editor of
National Geographic Adventure magazine asked her to write for the magazine and Salak's career as a freelance writer began. Salak gained a reputation for being a tough woman adventurer, surviving war zones, coup attempts, and life-threatening bouts with malaria and cholera (the
New York Times described her as a "tough, real life Lara Croft" and
Book Magazine described her as “the gutsiest ... and some say, craziest ... woman adventurer of our day.”)
Several of Salak's short stories have been published in journals such as
Prairie Schooner,
The Massachusetts Review,
Quarterly West and
Witness. One story, "Beheadings", about a war correspondent’s search for her lost brother, is published in the anthology, Best New American Voices.
According to Salak, she started writing at the age of six. After the death of her brother, Marc, in 2005, Salak took a year off from her magazine work to write her first novel
The White Mary. In an interview, she described the experience:
- "I wrote the entire book not long after my brother died. It was like an obsession. I lived in a tiny basement apartment in Columbia, Missouri, unemployed for a year. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. It was a very private experience. I almost feel that the book wasn’t so much written by me, but channeled through me."
Salak now writes regularly for
National Geographic Adventure,
National Geographic, and other magazines about her travels to places which include Iran, Rwanda, Libya, Burma, Borneo, Uganda and Peru. In 2003, she convinced some Ukrainian gun-runners to fly her to the war-ravaged east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Salak stayed in the Congolese town of Bunia, which was taken over by child soldiers, and experienced “the worst that human beings could do to each other, an endless parade of barbarism.” She received a PEN literary award for her article about that experience,. Her articles have also appeared in publications that include the
New York Times Magazine,
Travel & Leisure,
The Washington Post, and
Backpacker, and her work has appeared five times in Best American Travel Writing. Her fiction was selected for Best New American Voices (judged by Charles Baxter). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies, including Adrenaline 2002: The Year's Best Stories of Adventure and Survival, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction.
