Colorado author Peter Heller

Peter Heller grew up cloaked in artful words, submerged in lyrical language. He also grew up immersing himself in the ever-enticing outdoors. Combine the two and you have the unique talent that has won him both fans and awards.

His exuberant, gregarious approach to life has propelled him to bestseller lists and earned him literary praise.

He thanks his parents for that.

From his mother, a talented sculptor, he inherited “a fierce hunger for the truth and the courage to take artistic risks.”

But his father, a copywriter and playwright, probably had the most profound impact.

“My father read to me every night,” Heller recalled in an interview from his Denver home. “He read a lot of poetry to me when I was little. Yeats at 11. And E.E. Cummings. He was a writer and brilliant occasional poet. He helped me a lot as I was learning to write. He would read over my shoulder and offer advice.”

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Early on, Heller’s eclectic list of favorite books included works by Thurber, the Russian writers, Wallace Stevens and Faulkner. “I just couldn’t get over him … until I found Hemingway,” he said.

 At age 11, Heller “wanted to be Hemingway, to be that guy, and write like that.”

And although he was lucky enough to have a private education, at Putney School in Vermont, he still believes his best lessons came from his parents. What he did get from his years at school was lots of time outdoors and the encouragement of teachers who liked his writing.

“I was told I was a talented writer even when I was young, so that was really cool,” he said.

Then, at Dartmouth College, he learned to kayak while earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1982.

During his adult life, he has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide and world class pizza deliverer, according to his self-written website biography.

But Heller never stopped writing.

He went to Hollywood with a friend to write a screenplay once, and he thought the effort turned out well, though it never sold. But he couldn’t stand living in Los Angeles. In 1987, he came back to Colorado, where he had lived off and on prior to that.

The website bio, written in third person, includes a tantalizing litany of Heller’s grand adventures: “He has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucasus, Central America and Peru. He was the first man, with a Kiwi paddler named Roy Bailey, to kayak the Muk Su River in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan. The river was known as the Everest of Rivers in the Soviet Union, and the last team that had attempted it lost five of their eleven men. The run was 17 days of massive whitewater through a canyon inhabited by wolves and snow leopards.”

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Much of Heller’s nonfiction works are written in first-person, recalling some of those ambitious adventures. In “Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River,” published in Outside magazine in 2002, Heller recounted joining the most ambitious whitewater expedition in history through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet, visiting a spot three times deeper than the Grand Canyon (and the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri La).

In December, 2005, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, Heller joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet. He recounted that adventure in “The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals.” That trip included “fierce gales, 40-foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale.”

Heller has been close to dying himself several times along the way

Once, a plane he was flying had its engine die over the Continental Divide of the Rockies. He managed to glide to a landing.

Another time, when he was trapped upside down in a kayak under a rock ledge, he remembers thinking, “Oh, crap. This is it.” But it wasn’t. “I have been extremely lucky,” he said.

He admits he loved these precarious thrills. And given all that, he was happy in 2012 when his first book of fiction was an immediate success.

The Dog Stars, 2012, is a post-apocalyptic novel selected as the Apple iBooks Novel of the Year and Atlantic Monthly’s and The San Francisco Examiner’s Best Book of the Year.

His second novel, The Painter, 2014, earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly which called it “masterful.” It also won the Colorado Book Award and the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Hudson Books’ top fiction pick of the year, and an Amazon Top 20.

When another novel, Celine, came out, it made Entertainment Weekly’s top ten most anticipated books of 2017, and was a Library Journal editor’s pick.

The River, published in 2019, is an intense story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip. It became a national bestseller, followed by The Guide in 2021.

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Heller’s latest novel, Burn, 2024, takes us back to his New England days in a story so curious even the author didn’t know how it was going to turn out for most of the way.

In 2025, Heller was awarded the Frank Waters Award for literary achievement by the Pike Peak Library District.

The Colorado Encyclopedia describes Heller’s fiction this way: “Heller’s novels are prized for their beautiful, detailed descriptions of the natural world of the American West, which serves as the backdrop for dark, suspenseful adventures involving violence and loss. Despite experiencing significant struggles and sadness, his characters nevertheless maintain their humanity through their connection to the glimpses of peace and promise of new life that nature provides.”

With more than 30 books under his belt, Heller has no sense of stopping or running out of ideas.

Does he see writing fiction as a little safer than his big outdoor adventures?

“It depends on what you mean by safe,” he says. “There’s a line in The River when the two boys are talking about books and I think Jack says something about writers taking risks. I feel like my biggest adventure now, the biggest thrill, is in writing fiction, conquering that new territory, writing something beautiful and new and fresh.”

Some writers are master storytellers; some are superior masters of language. Heller seems to be both.

“It’s interesting,” he says, “because I love language. To tell a good story, to hook myself in, I just start with the right line. It has to have music, a cadence, a tone and a heft to it for me to get hooked on it. I am more interested in that than any plot.

“But it’s not one or the other for me, because there’s nothing I love more than telling a good story at a campfire. Or hearing a good story. My father was one of the best storytellers in the world.”

And that’s where it all began.