William Dietrich
Click the links below to read interviews with William Dietrich discussing his books:
The Barbary Pirates
The Dakota Cipher
The Rosettta Key
Napoleon's Pyramids
The Scourge of God
Hadrian's Wall
William Dietrich grew up near Puget Sound in the shadow of Mount Rainier, and like so many writers of the Pacific Northwest, it is geography, a sense of place, and the natural and human environment that flows through his writing. The influence of dramatic landscapes on people infects not only his non-fiction but his novels, set in Antarctica, the Australian Outback, the barbarian fringes of the Roman Empire, the sands of the Middle East, or frontier America.
The Pulitzer-winning journalist�s non-fiction has been widely used in university classes and his fiction has been sold into twenty-eight languages.
Dietrich was born on Sept. 29, 1951 in Tacoma, WA, graduated from Mount Tahoma High School during culturally tumultuous 1969, and attended Fairhaven College, an experimental liberal arts division of Western Washington University. Interest in writing led him to journalism at Western, and his first job was covering agricultural Skagit County for the Bellingham, WA, Herald. He got his literary start chronicling �Berry-Dairy Days� and other such modest events.
As proof that life moves in circle -- or at least that his own life has not progressed very far -- Dietrich moved back to the same area a quarter-century later, now residing only twenty miles from that first bureau office. In 2006, he took a half-time position as an assistant professor teaching environmental journalism and writing at Western. He considers himself fortunate to have a corner of the world he can truly call home.
From Bellingham in 1974, he was soon sent to report from the state capital in Olympia and then covered Congress for Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C. Not exactly enamored of life �inside the beltway,� he returned to the Northwest to write for the Vancouver Columbian in time to cover the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens next door. In 1982 he took a job at the Seattle Times, where he worked, on and off, through 2008.
Times assignments provided wonderful opportunities to report from the Arctic and Antarctic and to circle the globe, covering subjects ranging from the military to the environment. In 1987-88 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and in 1990 was part of a four-person team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He won reporting and study fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Woods Hole Microbiological Institute, and Scripps.
His first book, The Final Forest, (1992) grew out of his reporting on the spotted owl and old growth forest debate that convulsed the Pacific Northwest. Northwest Passage (1995) is an environmental and cultural history of the Columbia River inspired by its imperiled salmon runs and epic pioneer past.
Science was probably the most enjoyable and improbable subject Dietrich ever got to cover, since he was paid to correct his own abysmal ignorance. A 1994 fellowship to Antarctica and a kick in the pants from cancer (he has fully recovered) prompted the author to take a stab at a lifelong goal of writing a novel by producing the World War II bio-terrorism thriller Ice Reich (1998). Its first draft was finished during a second reporting trip to the white continent aboard an icebreaker: it was literally the first sight of icebergs that inspired him to finish the book.
He followed this with an Orwellian view of stultifying globalization and wilderness release in the Australian eco-fable Getting Back (2000) and then returned to Antarctica and the South Pole for the claustrophobic murder thriller Dark Winter (2001) that includes a scene from the Cascade Mountains near his home.
Dietrich has loved history since childhood and a 1996 visit to Great Britain led to the ancient Roman fortification across northern England known as Hadrian�s Wall. Even before his first novel was published he was determined to write a story about this evocative place, and after numerous delays the result is a war and romance novel set in Roman Britain called Hadrian�s Wall (2004).
Meanwhile, some of the essays he has written about nature for the Seattle Times were collected to create Natural Grace (2003). Royalties are donated to land preservation and environmental education.
Dietrich�s fascination with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire continued into a novel about Attila the Hun called The Scourge of God (2005).
He then approached the ancient world from a different perspective, writing a novel of pyramid lore set against Bonaparte�s 1798 invasion of Egypt and called Napoleon�s Pyramids (2007). A sequel set during Napoleon�s 1799 invasion of the Holy Land,
The Rosetta Key was published in 2008. Ethan returned in
The Dakota Cipher in 2009 and The Barbary Pirates in
2010.
Dietrich is still married to the wonderful woman he met in college, has two grown daughters too fine to be deserved, and when not writing or reporting he reads, hikes, sails, watches even-the-most-awful movies, remodels, and waves around the Roman cavalry sword his wife got to inspire him.
He still finds writing hard work, but prefers it to having to decide what to do when he grows up. Besides, he fully intends that his books and articles will save the world. |
