Badlands

Robert Kroetsch's classic novel follows a 1916 paleontological expedition into the Alberta badlands and a daughter's later reckoning with her father's ambitions.

Originally published in 1975, Badlands begins in 1916 when scientist William Dawe leads a fossil expedition into the Alberta badlands, determined to win recognition through the discovery of dinosaur remains. Fifty years later, his daughter Anna returns to the same landscape and confronts both the legacy of the expedition and the assumptions that shaped her father's work and world.

This illustrated edition pairs Kroetsch's comic, layered fiction with black-and-white photography by George Webber. Webber's images extend the novel's sense of place, bringing the stark forms, open spaces and visual strangeness of the badlands into conversation with Kroetsch's exploration of ambition, memory and Western Canadian identity.

The result is both a major work of Canadian literary fiction and a distinctive illustrated portrait of one of Alberta's most recognizable landscapes.

George Webber is a renowned documentary photographer whose previous books include Prairie Gothic (RMB, 2012), Last Call (RMB, 2010), A World Within: An Intimate Portrait of the Little Bow Hutterite Colony and People of the Blood: A Decade-long Photographic Journey on a Canadian Reserve. He is the recipient of numerous National Magazine Awards (Canada), two Awards of Excellence from the Society for News Design (USA) and the International Documentary Photography Award (Korea). His photographs have been featured in American Photo, Canadian Geographic, Lenswork Quarterly, Photolife, The New York Times and Swerve magazine. In 1999 he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in recognition of his contributions to the visual arts in Canada. George lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Robert Kroetsch was a teacher, editor and award-winning writer. Born in Heisler, Alberta, in 1927, Kroetsch grew up on his parents’ farm and studied at the University of Alberta and the University of Iowa. He taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton, until the late 1970s and then returned to Canada, where he taught at the University of Calgary and the University of Manitoba from the 1970s through the 1990s. Kroetsch also spent time at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts and many writer-in-residencies, where he powerfully influenced recent writing on the Canadian prairies and elsewhere. His generosity of spirit and openness to the new showed many authors new ways to pursue their own kinds of writing. In honour of both his writing and his contributions to Canadian culture in general, Kroetsch was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004. In 2011 he received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award. Robert Kroetsch died in a car accident outside of Edmonton, Alberta, in 2011.