My chief interests are biology, religion, and technology,
My most recent book, Fishing in Utopia, won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2009. It is about Sweden and the future that disappeared. Before that, I wrote a history of c. elegans was published in Feburary 2003 in the UK by by Simon and Schuster and in the autumn of 2003 in the US by Columbia University Press. It's an unassuming little worm; but I think you'll be amused by its pretensions. Like everyone else in the world, I am not working on a novel, in my case about snobbery and Englishness.
I reached this eminence
In 1995 I won the first annual Templeton prize as the best religious correspondent in Europe (unhappily this isn't the one that pays a million dollars). I also contributed to publications ranging from the News of the World to Vogue and the New York Review of Books.
In 1996 I tired of the excitement of working for the Mirror group, who then owned the Independent, and opted for the job security of full-time freelancing.
I have written think pieces and features for about half the national papers in London: the Guardian (I also write a weekly column for their online site), the Independent, the Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express; and an occasionally amusing press column in the Church Times . The cuttings (clips) section is in the middle of a redesign, but there are a few hundred searchable articles from all these publications and from others, here; and recent news and ramblings in Helmintholog.
I have also written for the Spectator where I was Scandinavian Correspondent and chief reporter in the early Eighties; the New Statesman where I had a column on the net; and I spent a happy winter in 1999/2000 writing a page of the Guardian every week, consisting of quick portraits of people not yet famous enough to be boring. I have done stuff for Salon on culture, technology, terrorism and eating goats. I sometimes write for Waterlog, the best fishing magazine in the world.
Simon and Schuster published in October the American paperback of my book The Darwin Wars. You might think of it as history of ideas with all the messy bits left in. You can get it in Japanese, too.
In case you're wondering about the Swedish poetry, pictures, etc, I used to live there, and this is the only place I get to use the language.
Any complaints, comments and so on should be addressed to me: I just found a wonderful quote from John Knox which seems germane here:
"And thus I cease, requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against me, that he may (they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself and all my doings manifest to the world. For to me it seemeth a thing unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to fight against shadows, and howlets that dare not abide the light."
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