Merlin Sheldrake, born in 1987, is a British biologist who has built a career on the organisms most of us walk over without noticing. He took a doctorate in tropical ecology at Cambridge, studying underground fungal networks in the forests of Panama while based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Fungi, in his telling, are not a footnote to plants and animals but a third way of being alive. They digest rock, feed forests, alter minds and blur the line between the individual and the collective, and he is happiest at the point where careful science meets a genuinely unsettling idea.
He writes like a naturalist rather than an explainer, curious in the first person and willing to eat, brew and grow his subject in pursuit of understanding. Entangled Life won the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2021 and the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, and it turned a specialist field into general reading almost overnight.
9 hours and 32 minutes
