The Consolations of the Forest
autobiographical work by Sylvain Tesson

The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga is a 2011 book by the French writer Sylvain Tesson. Its French title is Dans les forêts de Sibérie, which means "in the forests of Siberia". It recounts how Tesson lived isolated for six months, from February to July 2010, in a cabin in Siberia, on the northwestern shore of Lake Baikal. An English translation by Linda Coverdale was published in 2013.
Accolades
The book was awarded the Prix Médicis essai. It was the runner-up for the Prix Renaudot, losing to Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov. The English translation received the 2014 Dolman Best Travel Book Award.
Adaptations
The book is the basis for the 2016 film In the Forests of Siberia, directed by Safy Nebbou and starring Raphaël Personnaz.
Virgile Dureuil adapted the book into the comic book Dans les forêts de Sibérie, published by Casterman in 2019.
“The Consolations of the Forest” enters the record as autobiographical work by Sylvain Tesson. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Consolations, Forest and autobiographical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Consolations of the Forest” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.