Jennifer Kingsley’s bio

Jennifer Kingsley has traveled for hundreds of days through some of the planet’s last great wildernesses. She has worked as a guide, naturalist and conservationist for more than a decade and has paddled remote rivers in Nunavut, watched polar bears in Greenland, tracked grizzlies in B.C.’s coastal rainforest and sailed the North Pacific and Atlantic. She began doing long paddling trips at the age of 22 and has since traveled in the Arctic many times.

While completing her biology degree, Kingsley won the Parks Canada Award for Communications Excellence and a Silver Medal from Interpretation Canada for educational theatre. Since then, Jennifer has worked for three of the top four adventure cruising companies in the world, as named by National Geographic Adventure.

Kingsley completed her Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Victoria in 2010 and participated in the Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program where she was mentored by accomplished non-fiction writers including Ian Brown and Don Gillmor. Her manuscript, Paddlenorth, received an non-fiction emerging writers grant from the Canada Council in 2012. Paddlenorth is now a book (Greystone Books) which won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2015. Kingsley’s other writing has been published in various magazines and newspapers.

Jennifer Kingsley is also a freelance radio producer for CBC programs including The Sunday Edition, and her audio work has been featured by the Third Coast International Audio Festival and by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In 2013, her documentary “The Whale’s Choice” was chosen for the best of narrative list by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Kingsley is a skilled public speaker who has given presentations to tens of thousands of people between Vancouver Island, Halifax and Baffin Island. She actively seeks opportunities to articulate her passion for the world’s wildest places.