Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah was born in New York City in 1969 to Indian physicians and grew up shuttling between the north-eastern United States and her extended family's homes in Mumbai and Bangalore. She studied philosophy and neuroscience at Oberlin, became an investigative science journalist, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction. Her earlier books took her to the oil trade and to clinical drug trials run on the world's poorest patients, and The Fever, from 2010, follows malaria through half a million years of human history. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, published by Bloomsbury in 2020, gathers evidence from botany, genetics and archaeology to argue that plants, animals and people have always been on the move, that the older science treating relocation as an aberration does not hold up, and that a warming climate will make it ordinary again. It reached the shortlist for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.