Join us March 21 for our March MFA Book Club – Karen Pinchin in conversation with RC Shaw
Karen Pinchin is a Kjipuktuk/Halifax-based science journalist specializing in complex, investigation-fuelled longform stories about food systems, environment, technology and culture. She is also mentor in the MFA in King’s creative nonfiction program.
Her first book, Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, was a national bestseller published in Canada, the US and the UK in July 2023. Starred by Kirkus, it was reviewed by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Civil Eats, and named one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of the Year.
Previously, Karen edited and acquired non-fiction titles for New Brunswick’s Goose Lane Editions, where two of her books went on to become national bestsellers. She has won gold awards for her longform journalism at both the Atlantic Journalism Awards and the National Magazine Awards, was the 2019/2020 Tow Fellow at PBS FRONTLINE and won Columbia University’s Lynton Book Award in 2019. Her work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, and she’s a regular contributor to Canadian Geographic, Hakai Magazine, and The Globe and Mail.
From Penguin Random House Publishers: The marvelous tale of one fish, the fisherman who first caught her, and how our insatiable appetite for bluefin tuna turned a cottage industry into a massive global dilemma.
In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap.
Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish’s fate.
Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin’s exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.
