[2] Harris was born in Ontario and grew up dreaming of exploring Mars.
[2] She viewed the Earth as having been thoroughly explored and charted before her lifetime, so she set her eyes on another planet.
This life-long inspiration to explore led her to bike across the Silk Road, which she documented in her first book Lands of Lost Borders.
Her first book, Lands of Lost Borders, a nonfiction book describing her experiences bicycling 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi) of Asia's historic Silk Road over a 14 month period in 2011, won the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, the 2019 Edna Staebler Award,[3] and 2019 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature.
[3][1] In an interview with Anna Maria Tremonti of The Current, Harris described falling in love with the land around Atlin, British Columbia, when she skied across the nearby Juneau Icefield as part of an undergraduate field course in glaciology.