Once you go fiction, you can’t go back.

Award-winning Denver author Peter Heller lived a swashbuckling life as a nonfiction adventure and environmental writer before finally succumbing to the lifelong internal nudge to write novels.

“Once you start making it up, it’s tough to go back,” he said.

Heller spent two decades writing for Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal and National Geographic Adventure. Those stories, chronicling his adventures as an expedition kayaker around the world, as well as joining the crew of an eco-pirate ship headed to Antarctica to hunt down a deadly Japanese whaling fleet, spawned four nonfiction books, including the 2004 “Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.”

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And then he changed course.

“I had to make a living when I got out of college and journalism was a joyful diversion,” he said. “I was about 50 when I thought it’s time to write that novel I’ve been dreaming about since I was a little boy. It’s time to make it all up, which I wanted to do in journalism but wasn’t allowed to.”

His 2012 debut post-apocalyptic novel, “The Dog Stars,” deemed the best book of the year by Atlantic Monthly, San Francisco Examiner and others, was recently adapted as a feature film with director Ridley Scott and an A-list cast, including Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin. It’s being filmed in Italy.

And his most recent novel, the dystopian “Burn,” about two old friends who go hunting off the grid in Maine only to find civilization destroyed upon their return, was released last year.

“I used journalism as cross-training,” Heller said. “I learned important things like how to make a character jump off the page as a living being and how to establish a sense of place that a reader can get transported into right away. You’ve got to snag the reader and get them into the page immediately.”

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Heller is this year’s winner of the Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District’s annual Frank Waters Award, established in 1993 in Waters’ name for excellence in writing about the West. Waters, a Colorado Springs native, was lauded for his novels and historical works about the American West. The award comes with a $2,000 prize.

Heller will serve as keynote speaker at the group’s annual awards luncheon. Reservations are required by 5 p.m. Friday. Go online to friendsofppld.org/literaryawards.

“Peter Heller’s writing evokes the natural, and especially Western, landscape with an intimate knowledge and authority that comes from personal experience,” said Linda DuVal, co-chair of the Friends awards selection committee. “His themes, literary style and storytelling skills fully engage the reader.”

The library support group also presents an annual Golden Quill Award to a local author, illustrator, photographer or publication for outstanding literary achievement. This year’s winners are P.J. Anderson and Patrick Anderson for “Cheyenne Mountain: Here’s Looking at You,” which chronicles the history of Cheyenne Mountain from its geologic period through the current day. The award comes with a $1,000 prize.

“P.J. and Patrick Anderson crystalized 30 years of personal and professional history into the volume of important local history,” said Bev Diehl, a member of the Friends awards selection committee. “Well-researched, documented and illustrated, the book is an excellent contribution to our regional history.”

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Two decades of real-life adventures naturally inform Heller’s fiction. Many of his books are set on rivers and in the wilderness, like his 2019 thriller “The River,” about two buddies on a perilous Canadian canoe trip, where a wildfire and mysterious man threaten their lives. The book was based on a real-life canoe trip he took on his third date with his now wife, while last year’s “Burn” was based on a kayaking vacation in north-central Maine.

Heller never starts a book with an idea, but with a good opening line. “I have to be enchanted with the first few lines, with the sounds of them and the mood they evoke and the heft of them,” he said.

“He let the fire burn down to embers, let the dark envelop him, and stood,” reads the first page of “Burn.”

“It feels like it has some gravitas,” Heller said. “I discovered this guy was up in Maine and moose hunting with his best friend. They encounter a bridge that was blown up and had no idea what was going on and neither did I. I was discovering what was happening with these guys. I called my agent and said do you think it was aliens? He said I don’t know, keep writing. I was on the edge of my seat.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270