I am ecstatic to announce that my latest tome, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, has been shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. A popular-science equivalent of the Booker Prize, the Royal Society has been awarding this in one form or another since 1988.
According to this article in The Bookseller the shortlist of just six titles was drawn from a field of 219 submitted for consideration, so just to be shortlisted is an honour (the overall winner will be announced 29 November), and I can safely say that this is the apotheosis of my zenith this week.
Writing a PhD thesis* got me into the swing of writing books and ever since then I have been writing something or another. My first book was published before I was thirty. This year I turned sixty. My writings have had a small but enthusiastic tolerant audience, but I have ever been just under the radar: they say one must toil in obscurity for decades before one becomes an overnight sensation. I can be consoled that Tolkien was 62 when The Lord of the Rings was published, and even then that was just the first volume.
Just so you know, the other shortlisted titles are —
Age Proof: The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life, by Professor Rose Anne Kenny;
Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender, by Frans de Waal;
Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle against Climate Change Denial, by Peter Stott;
Spike: The Virus vs the People, by Jeremy Farrar, with Anjana Ahuja;
and
The Greywacke: How a Priest, a Soldier and a School Teacher Uncovered 300 Million Years of History, by Nick Davidson.
*My first attempt was failed referred as they thought it too readable to be a PhD thesis: I was told I had to go away and make it more boring. I was in good company. The late SF author Isaac Asimov had been selling short stories to pay his way through graduate school. When the time came to write up his thesis he was afraid that after all those years of learning to write well, he wouldn’t be able to write badly enough to satisfy his thesis committee (as recalled in The Early Asimov).
