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Sy Montgomery was an animal in a previous life. She has been told that so many times by shamans and fortune tellers that she tends to believe it.
“I always feel better in the company of animals,” she wrote in her book, The Good, Good Pig. “I am drawn to them so strongly it leaves some people alarmed. I once leaped out of a moving truck in India in order to stroke a nine-foot-long python.”
Montgomery has spent her adult life pursuing, writing about and talking about animals. Research for her 14 books has taken her to the remote corners of the earth, from the jungles of India and the Amazon to the mountains of Zaire and Southeast Asia. She has written about man-eating tigers, pink dolphins, gorillas, bears, snakes and tarantulas, and is at work on a book about the snow leopards of Mongolia.
Montgomery writes books for both adults and children in hopes of instilling in her readers a respect for nature and an urgency to protect fellow creatures and Earth.
“In our day-to-day lives, by the purchases we choose or avoid every day, by the food we eat, we powerfully affect the lives of other creatures,’’ she says in an interview appended to the paperback edition of The Good, Good Pig. “We need to reach out in many different ways to those who aren’t aware. Maybe it will be a billboard that changes someone’s mind, or a television show. Or maybe a book – even my book.”
Montgomery’s books have won many national and regional awards. The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans received an Oppenheim Gold Award and was featured on The Today Show. The Tarantula Scientist was honored with the American Library Association’s prestigious Robert F. Sibert Honor Award and was named a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, among other honors.
In addition to writing books, Montgomery has been a commentator for National Public Radio and a nature columnist for the Boston Globe. Her articles have appeared in many magazines and in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Montgomery’s affinity for animals goes back to childhood, and while it has often made her feel out of place, it is an immutable part of her being.
As she writes in The Good, Good Pig: “While other people are thinking about a new kitchen or a Caribbean cruise, or whether their child will win the soccer match, or what to wear to a party, I am thinking about how a possum’s tail feels as it grips a branch, or whether the snapping turtle who tried to lay eggs in our yard last year will come back this fall.”
Montgomery is a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University. She and her husband, author Howard Montgomery, live with what she calls their “interspecies family” on a farm in New Hampshire.
