Peter Heller's first great adventure, at 29, could also have been the last. The first day of that very dangerous kayak expedition through the waters of the Tibetan plateau, one of his adventure companions died in his arms. Since then he has not stopped exploring the limits of nature and also of writing. When he was a child in Brooklyn Heights, Heller preferred to dig into the bushes and perch on trees rather than play with a ball in the yard, and he was more excited to hear Martin Luther King's speech ("language music") than Beatles songs. Released from school, he lived in Boulder, Colorado, where he taught kayaking, worked as a pizza maker and wrote poems and stories in his room. He has only abandoned the second of these three activities, to which he has added an absolute passion for surfing, which accredits in the diary of his website, where he collects the e-mails of like-minded readers and adventurers that will probably appear later in one of his books.

Although now, over fifty, is living another more domestic adventure (marriage), Heller has not abandoned either the backpack or the notebook: in 2002 he enlisted in one of the most ambitious water adventures in history in the Great Tsangpo Canyon, from which his book Hell or High Water came out: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River, awarded by various publications. Three years later, Heller, commissioned by National Geographic Adventure, boarded an eco-pirate ship that sailed the Antarctic waters to abort the work of the powerful Japanese whaling fleet. In 2007, he paddled towards a cove with a camera in his helmet to discover the killing of dolphins and whales in some remote Japanese coves.

Heller says that the good thing about writing about an adventure instead of living it is that "you don't need ibuprofen." Also that fiction allows you not to know what will happen next. Perhaps for all this he debuted in 2012 as a novelist with The constellation of the Dog, the apocalyptic adventure of a born survivor and a sensitive narrator. Like Heller