Image: Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Award
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Accessible Impact’
Today at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (August 12), the £25,000 (US$31,899) Royal Society Science Book Prize has announced a 2024 shortlist of six titles in what the program terms “popular science writing.”
All the authors on the list this year are new to the program, the initial pool of submissions coming to 254 titles published between July 1, 2023, and September 30. The winner is to be revealed on October 24. Each of the five shortlisted authors not named the winner will receive £2,500 (US$3,190) in this program, which is supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation in a five-year partnership.
John Hutchinson
In a comment on today’s shortlist release, John Hutchinson, who chairs the 2024 jury, is quoted, saying, “Competition for this shortlist was extreme. The 2023-2024 year has been incredible for great science books. …
“There’s something for everyone interested in science here, whether it’s for your own leisure reading and enlightenment, a gift to someone else, or for education in STEM disciplines. Humanity needs creative and scholarly books like these that digest the huge wealth of modern scientific understanding and translate it into accessible impact.”
Hutchinson’s associates on the jury panel this year are:
- Booker Prize-winning author and screenwriter Eleanor Catton
- New Scientist comment and culture editor Alison Flood
- Teacher, broadcaster, and writer Bobby Seagull
- Lecturer in functional materials at Imperial College London
- Royal Society university research fellow Jess Wade
The Trivedi Science Book Prize 2024 Shortlist
- Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon (Penguin Random House / Hutchinson Heinemann)
- Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World by Tom Chivers (Hachette / Orion / Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
- Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy by Kashmir Hill (Simon & Schuster)
- The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction by Gísli Pálsson (Princeton University Press)
- Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan (Hachette / Hodder Press)
- A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Random House / Particular Books)
The Market Impact Question
There’s no indication yet that this award program plans to report on the market impact that a win of its top honor may provide to an author, title, and publisher—something that has been done by the Booker Prize Foundation for its lead fiction and international fiction in translation awards; the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding; and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.
It’s a path that could well be taken not only by the Royal Society’s science prize but also by programs of the Wolfson History Prize; the Cundill History Prize; the German Nonfiction Prize; the Business Book of the Year Award; and the Parliamentary Book Awards, among others.
Past Winners of the Royal Society Book Award
- 2023: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
- 2022: A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters by Henry Gee
- 2021: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
- 2020: Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships by Camilla Pang
- 2019: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
- 2018: Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
- 2017: Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine
- 2016: The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
- 2015: Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince
- 2014: Stuff by Mark Miodownik
- 2013: The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll
- 2012: The Information by James Gleick
- 2011: The Wavewatcher’s Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
- 2010: Life Ascending by Nick Lane
- 2009: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
- 2008: Six Degrees by Mark Lynas
- 2007: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
- 2006: Electric Universe by David Bodanis
- 2005: Critical Mass by Philip Ball
- 2004: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- 2003: Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus
- 2002: The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
- 2001: Mapping the Deep by Robert Kunzig
- 2000: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
- 1999: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman
- 1998: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
- 1997: The Wisdom of Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman
- 1996: Plague’s Progress by Arno Karlen
- 1995: The Consumer’s Good Chemical Guide by John Emsley
- 1994: The Language of the Genes by Steve Jones
- 1993: The Making of Memory by Steven Rose
- 1992: The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
- 1991: Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould
- 1990: The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
- 1989: Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin
- 1988: Living with Risk by the British Medical Association Board of Science
More from us on publishing and book awards in the international industry is here, and more on the Royal Science Book Award is here.