Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize 2024 shortlist announced

In the UK, the shortlist for the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, which celebrates ‘the best popular science writing from across the globe’, has been announced, reports BookBrunch.

The six shortlisted titles, chosen from 254 submissions, are:

• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Cat Bohannon, Penguin)
• Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World (Tom Chivers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy (Kashmir Hill, S&S)
• The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction (Gísli Pálsson, Princeton University Press)
• Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality (Venki Ramakrishnan, Hodder & Stoughton)
• A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (Kelly & Zach Weinersmith, Particular Books).

The shortlist was chosen by a judging panel that included professor John Hutchinson (chair), author Eleanor Catton; New Scientist comment and culture editor Alison Flood; teacher, broadcaster and writer Bobby Seagull; and Imperial College London lecturer Jess Wade.

Said Hutchinson: ‘Competition for this shortlist was extreme. 2023–2024 has been an incredible year for great science books. Our shortlist spans a wonderful variety of highly timely topics: from artificial intelligence and privacy issues to the challenges of space settlement, to the underappreciated importance of a statistical method, to the evolution of female reproductive biology, to the discovery of human-induced extinction itself, and to the biology of ageing and death.

‘There’s something for everyone interested in science here, whether it’s for your own leisure reading and enlightenment, a generous 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.’

The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on 24 October. The winner receives £25,000 (A$48,492) and each of the other five shortlisted authors will receive £2500 (A$4851).

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