Meet the authors

As part of this year’s celebrations, we asked our six shortlisted authors a series of short questions to find out more about their research processes and the inspiration behind their books.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

I am utterly delighted and honoured. My hope in writing Material World was to underline that all of us, in every part of the planet, are dependent on certain materials – often sourced from vulnerable parts of the world, sometimes at great cost to locals and their environment. Managing this process is an enormous economic, scientific, political and cultural challenge – so I’m especially grateful the British Academy Book Prize has chosen to highlight it by shortlisting my book.

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

It began with a suspicion that the stories we tell ourselves about the world we inhabit are not quite right. We believe we live in an ever more dematerialised world, where intangible things like ideas and apps are far more important than the stuff we dig and blast from the ground.

That’s reinforced by economic statistics like Gross Domestic Product which append a very low value to simple physical products like steel or cement or sand and a high premium for services like social networks or AI.

But those services couldn’t function without these materials. The internet couldn’t happen without fibre optics and fibre optics are essentially made of glass - which in turn is made from sand. Something similar goes for AI, which depends on semiconductors made from silicon.

Everything we touch - every pound of GDP - depends on stuff we dig and blast and refine from the ground. Along the way we displace people from their homes; we create untold carbon emissions and other pollution. Yet this perspective on our civilisation is often ignored.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

I found myself constantly amazed and disturbed throughout the process. Perhaps above all else, it was the scale of the devastation it takes to extract minerals from the ground and turn them into everyday products. Everything you touch every day involves the deployment of vast amounts of energy and, almost certainly, large amounts of carbon emissions.

It involves the use of techniques which date back centuries - even something as seemingly advanced as a silicon chip. It involves disruption to human lives and often damage to health. Yet because this stuff is mostly happening on the other side of the planet we’ve made it very easy not to think about it.

But by ignoring the realities of what it takes to construct the world around us - from our physical environment to the food we eat - we forget the compromises. One unexpected upshot of this is we underestimate the scale of effort and disruption it will take to achieve all those climate goals we’ve set ourselves.

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

I hope they end the book feeling, in the best possible way, conflicted. The logic of the Material World is that it will be hard - harder than most people assume - to reduce our carbon emissions.

But by the same token history shows we humans are amazing at overcoming these kinds of challenges. Perhaps the key lesson is that we are, in some senses, no different to our ancestors going all the way back to the stone age. Since time immemorial, humans have sought to extract rocks from the earth and turn them into tools that improve their lives. The semiconductor is, in this sense, merely the latest incarnation of this perpetual “stone age”.

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

News of Smoke and Ashes being nominated for the British Academy's Book Prize fills me with immense gratitude and excitement. The Academy is a storied institution, and it is a great honour to be included in this extremely distinguished shortlist. This recognition underscores the importance of exploring the entanglements between human history and the planetary environment, a theme central to the book.

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

Smoke and Ashes grew out of the research for my trilogy of novels, Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. In writing these books I discovered that the opium trade, a seemingly distant historical event, casts a long shadow on our world. Understanding this history is crucial for grasping the intricate web of power and dependency that continues to influence our lives today.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

The most startling revelation was the extent to which the opium trade was foundational to the modern world. From the rise of industrial capitalism to the formation of nation-states, the impact of this illicit trade is pervasive. It was also shocking to uncover the degree to which this dark chapter of history has been systematically erased or minimised.

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

I hope readers will carry with them a heightened awareness of our interconnectedness as a global community. The opium trade serves as a stark reminder of how the actions of a few can have far-reaching consequences. It is essential to recognise the complex legacies of colonialism and capitalism if we are to build a more just and sustainable future.

The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

We are both delighted and honoured to hear that The Secret Lives of Numbers has made the shortlist for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. In our book, we present a new history of mathematics, one that puts the global nature of its origins at the centre and tells the stories of those who have often been left out.

Our aim was to showcase how the history of mathematics isn't a straight line starting with the Ancient Greeks and continuing one step at a time until today. It is far more chaotic, disjointed, beautiful, magnificent and of course global than that. This award – for Global Cultural Understanding – recognises exactly the aims we had for our book and so we couldn't be more proud to be shortlisted.

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

The history of mathematics is far more complex, fascinating and global than the way it is often presented. Our motivation was to show how the origins of mathematics aren't just about a group of ancient Greek men, but also an amazing cast of people and cultures from across the world, ranging from China to South America. Because of the logical nature of mathematics, we often imagine that its origins should be a straight line, with one development neatly leading on to another – but it is far more interesting than that. Ideas have sprung up all around the world, sometimes to be forgotten and rediscovered, and other times passed between different peoples to live on. The history of mathematics is beautifully chaotic. We felt it was time for a book to really capture that.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

Pretty much everything we thought we knew about the origins of mathematics was challenged in one way or another when writing the book. No subject is immune from bias and mathematics is the same. Some really well-known stories ended up being misrepresentations, presenting facts in such a way to give a distorted view, and others ended up being altogether wrong. As we worked our way through thousands of years of mathematical history we were constantly surprised by how much we had to alter our own perceptions.

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

There is no such thing as a complete history, there never can be, but our hope is that this book is a starting point. The origins of mathematics are so different to the usual stories that we tell about it and we want that to change. We hope that our book helps a more global – and beautifully chaotic – understanding of the history of mathematics to become mainstream.

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

I was delighted and very honoured to learn about my nomination for the British Academy Book Prize. In The Tame and the Wild, I conclude that contemporary factory farming is far from a universal or natural way for people to interact with other animals. In order to see that this ecologically and socially horrific arrangement was not inevitable – nor needs to endure – requires comparative histories of human-animal relationships. So, it was wonderful to have my book recognised by the prize committee for contributing to “global cultural understanding.” I could not be more pleased!

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

I was baffled by this paradox: On the one hand, we know that, in aggregate, animals today suffer more than at any point in history. Consider the billions (!) of animals who lead tortured lives in confinement and then are slaughtered for human over-consumption, and the others who die because of human-caused climate change, water pollution, deforestation, and so on. And, yet, on the other hand, so many of us have pets whom we adore and consider family members. So, I wanted to understand how we got here. I think my book illuminates global culture because it shows that certain arrangements that many of us take for granted – such as animal agriculture – are not the only systems devised by human ancestors. Other ancestors, such as those in Native America, created systems that emphasised our kinship and interdependence with other rather than ideas of hierarchy and difference.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

A big part of the story I tell in my book is about how Indigenous people throughout South America and Mexico practiced familiarisation – the process of capturing and taming individual wild animals with the objective of making them into family members. I was amazed at the dazzling variety of species chosen for this purpose. That there were many parrots and monkeys is probably not surprising, but I was astounded by the many other species – tapir, peccary, deer, rattlesnakes, lizards, owls, possum, sloths --- even manatee – to name a few!

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

I want people to understand that – from a historical as well as ethical perspective – there is nothing natural or inevitable about our current system of animal agriculture. When we look beyond a Eurocentric horizon, we see that it is equally “natural” for humans to recognise other animals as our cousins as it is to see them as objectified livestock. It might be useful for Westerners to internalise the Indigenous Amazonian perspective that we should not eat whom we feed.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

I’m thrilled that my book Language City, which is all about the deep linguistic diversity of today’s cities, has been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding— a unique award that could not be more resonant or timely.

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

As a linguist at the Endangered Language Alliance, I’ve been involved in the fight for linguistic diversity for over a decade. I’ve worked closely with the six language defenders I profile in Language City, who come from communities all over the world that may be new to most readers.

To understand global culture, we have to look at languages, and in particular at the endangered, Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages that make up the majority of the world’s mother tongues. They represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding, and living that define what it is to be human—and they’re evolving fast in the face of contemporary challenges. The dominant languages not only get all the attention, but are unrepresentative in so many ways. To understand how immigration, urbanisation, and diasporisation are shaping cultures everywhere today, we need the lens of language.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

The deeper I went, the more I found myself exploring a striking paradox—that language loss may be accelerating worldwide, with half of all 7000-plus languages now considered endangered, but at the same time more and more of those languages are arriving in cities. Never before have cities like New York and London (but many smaller cities as well) been as linguistically diverse as they are today. But the new urban linguistic diversity could diminish fast, before we've even had a chance to recognise, document, or protect it.

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

Language is an index of time spent with people. It’s not just a code to crack, or a string of sounds that can be automated, translated, broken down, but the ever-evolving expression of a set of relations. Of course, transmitting information is part of what language does, but much more is at stake in terms of our individual and collective identities. I also think it’s crucial to hear the languages themselves in the original as much as possible and to grapple with the linguistic features—not just lexical but phonological, morphological, syntactic and so on—that make languages distinct and shape us in untold and often unimaginable ways.

Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare

The British Academy Book Prize celebrates books that champion global cultural understanding. What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for such a prize?

I am honoured to have made the shortlist for the British Academy Book Prize. In writing Divided, I sought to create a text that is both accessible and provides fresh perspectives. Making your voice heard can be a constant struggle but there are glimmers of hope that suggest more of us are being listened to.

What was the motivation for writing this book and how does it help readers gain a better understanding of global culture?

I’m so honoured to be shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding as I believe the spirit of this prize encapsulates so much of what I was trying to achieve with Divided.

Writing Divided felt urgent. I started writing in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global Black Lives Matter protests. I found that much of the mainstream discussion surrounding scientific racism – and how it operates on a global scale – were lacking the depth and precision needed for change to happen. For us to fully comprehend how racial hierarchies have been used and continue to be weaponised, I needed to tell that story. I was an insider to this story, as a clinician and researcher, but also an outsider, as an activist and a Black woman – a second generation Nigerian-British women.

I want to equip everyone with the knowledge to change the status quo and achieve greater equity. These are complex discussions – how racism continues to operate within the medical sciences healthcare – but they shouldn’t be exclusionary. I hope that the stories that I draw on and the people I’ve interviewed illustrate that.

What surprised you the most when researching and writing the book?

I am often told that Divided can be a shocking and disturbing read. I spent so many hours examining archives, research papers and interviewing experts, uncovering racism at the heart of much widely celebrated scientific work. One of the most shocking moments was reading the original manuscript of Sir Francis Galton’s Kantsaywhere in the collection at UCL: a book he penned about a racist, eugenic utopia.

What is one key thought or theme that you hope will stick with readers once they’ve finished the book?

We must continue to interrogate the notion that evidence-based medicine is objective. That it isn’t deeply moulded and impacted by the oppression that we see in all other walks of life is a lie. It was drummed into at me at school that if the metanalysis says x, then x is the truest, but what happens when we have rotten scientific foundations?

The idea that medicine is objective and free from bias is a fallacy. The science we have today is shaped by the complex socio-historical context of yesterday. If we are to achieve greater health equity, then acknowledging this is essential.