Andrea Wulf

Alexander von Humboldt was celebrated across two continents in his lifetime and largely forgotten in the English-speaking world by the twentieth century. The Invention of Nature, published in 2015, put him back, following him up Chimborazo in 1802, through Latin America, and into the notebooks of Darwin, Thoreau and John Muir, all of whom took from him the idea that nature is a single connected web rather than a catalogue of separate things. The book won the Costa Biography Award and the Royal Society science book prize. Andrea Wulf was born in New Delhi, grew up in Hamburg, and trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art in London, where she lives. Her earlier books, The Brother Gardeners and Founding Gardeners, worked the same seam of plants and politics, while Magnificent Rebels in 2022 turned to the philosophers and poets gathered at Jena around 1800. With the illustrator Lillian Melcher she made a graphic version of the Humboldt story, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, in 2019.