Andrew Westoll

Adventurer, scientist and journalist Andrew Westoll has lived the dream of every aspiring primatologist. At 23, he spent a year following wild troops of capuchin monkeys through the remote Central Suriname Nature Reserve, the largest tract of pristine rainforest left on earth.

Nestled above Brazil and the Upper Amazon Basin, Suriname is the least travelled country in South America and one of the world’s great ecological secrets. Although many untouched places have been hailed as The Last Eden, Suriname has a legitimate claim to the title. Ninety percent of this mysterious country is covered in thick, neo-tropical jungle, with a population density similar to Russian Siberia.

Five years after his first adventure there, Westoll returned to to satisfy a long-standing fixation, on a quest to uncover Suriname’s quintessential soul. The result is his debut book, The Riverbones, a passionate, stunningly written travel-memoir and eco-narrative that describes his five-month odyssey-of-return through the untouched rainforests of Suriname.

Through wondrous photography and gripping adventures — such as his adoption by the Saramakan royal family, his perilous friendship with a bodyguard of the former military dictator, his compulsive search for the rare and beautiful blue frog called okopipi – Westoll maps the natural and human geography of this exotic, unknown land while hunting for closure to his strange obsession with it. By spinning a spellbinding story of survival, heartbreak, mystery and murder, Westoll illustrates how the modern struggles for human rights and ecological preservation can often vie, with tragic consequences, with the economic needs of a proud people.

Andrew Westoll is an award-winning journalist specializing in issues of science, travel, conservation, and culture. A former biologist and primatologist, he now writes regularly for many of Canada’s premier venues, such as The Walrus, Explore, Outpost and the Globe and Mail.

Westoll won gold at the 2007 National Magazine Awards for his travel piece "Somewhere Up a Jungle River" , an adapted excerpt from The Riverbones. He is also a past Fellow of the Literary Journalism Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.