about alanna mitchell

Alanna Mitchell is a Canadian author and journalist who writes about global science issues. She specializes in investigating changes to the earth's life-support systems and travels the world in search of scientists at the centre of what's going on.

Her first book, Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots, came out in 2004 in Canada and in 2005 in the rest of the English-speaking world, to international praise.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Reuters Foundation named Mitchell the best environmental journalist in the world in 2000 after an international competition. The prize was a fellowship at Oxford University, which Mitchell took up in the Hilary term of 2002, studying with the eminent ecologist Norman Myers.

Her second book, Sea Sick: The Hidden Crisis in the Global Ocean, has been published in the US and the UK and has become an international best seller. It was first published to great acclaim in Australia by Murdoch Books in September 2008. Sea Sick was published in Canada in March 2009 by McClelland & Stewart, with a paperback version available in March 2010.

Alanna has an essay in Tim Flannery's book Now or Never, published in Canada by Harper Collins. Now or Never discusses in detail three potential solutions to climate change, the most urgent of the challenges we face in our pursuit of sustainability.

Mitchell's first degree is in Latin literature and English literature from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Her second, a bachelor of applied arts in journalism, is from Ryerson University in Toronto.

“With scientific gravitas, complemented by the skilful use of layman's language, Tim Flannery paints a serious picture of the planet's future.”
----Richard Branson

She started her career as a journalist at Canada's The Financial Post where she covered the real estate market, the Robert Campeau and Reichmann business interests, and the Canadian banking industry. She won two awards for her coverage of the collapse of the Campeau empire.

After three years at The Post, she moved to Canada's National Newspaper, The Globe and Mail, to write about social trends and statistics. Eventually, she became the national Calgary correspondent for The Globe and then, back in Toronto after six years, a feature writer on earth sciences. She won four major national and international awards during her stint at The Globe.

She left daily journalism in 2004 after 17 years to devote herself to writing popular science books and magazine articles, also setting up her own consultancy on environmental issues and strategic communications. Her clients are in the non-profit sector as well as industry. She is an Associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Winnipeg.

Mitchell won the 2008 Atkinson Fellowship in Journalism, a $100,000 prize, to conduct a new course of study on the intersection of neuroscience and education.

Raised in Saskatchewan by an artist mother and a biologist father, Mitchell now lives in Toronto with her second husband, James Patterson, and their two children.