The Royal Society has announced the finalists for its Trivedi Science Book Prize, the annual U.K. award that “celebrates the best popular science writing from across the globe.”
Cat Bohannon made the shortlist for Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, which was also a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Kashmir Hill was named a finalist for Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy.
Tom Chivers was shortlisted for Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World, alongside Gísli Pálsson for The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction.
Also named finalists were Venki Ramakrishnan for Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality and Kelly and Zach Weinersmith for A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said in a statement, “Each of this year’s shortlisted books is a testament to both the wonders of science and the art of writing and bring these fascinating and varied areas of enquiry and discovery to curious readers everywhere.”
The Science Book Prize was established in 1988. Previous winners include Stephen Jay Gould for Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Bill Bryson for A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Caroline Criado Perez for Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
The winner of this year’s award will be announced on Oct. 24.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
