Sarah Louise Butler has lived in the Kootenays since 2003, where she’s raised a son, run a catering company, and been gratefully immersed in the natural year-round beauty of the region, encompassing the traditional, ongoing and unceded territories of the the Ktunaxa, the Sinixt and the Syilx.

She describes her books as ‘Geographic Fiction’ : novels so deeply rooted in a specific landscape that they couldn’t take place anywhere else. Her debut novel, The Wild Heavens, was published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2020. It’s a love story, a family drama, and an ode to the human and non-human inhabitants of the Inland Temperate Rainforest in BC. After its release, she was named a CBC Writer to Watch in 2020. She recently toured in France with the French edition, Toutes Les Créatures, published by Éditions Phébus.

Her second novel, Rufous and Calliope, featuring treehouses, twins, and train-hopping, is forthcoming in September 2025. It will be released in French in early 2026.