In progress
Our Beloved Ghosts
Making sense of a spectre.
How a haunting in my youth is challenging the fundamental ideas in my work.
04 · Books
The books
My first co-edited book, Stolen Voices, was an epistolary history of twentieth-century conflict. My first solo-authored book, On Extinction, was a loose environmental history of the Anthropocene, focusing in particular on the nostalgic impulse.
My second book, How to Be Animal, in which I write more explicitly on my ideas, is primarily diagnostic: humans are animals whose awareness of vulnerability and death repeatedly drives them to imagine their real identity somewhere outside the body.
My third book, Alive, is a positive ontology, arguing that living bodies are not passive matter but self-maintaining, purposive centres of activity, norms, and agency.
I am now working on a book that narrates an encounter with a ghost in my youth that challenges my philosophy.
Books
2006 — presentIn progress
Our Beloved Ghosts
Making sense of a spectre
How a haunting in my youth is challenging the fundamental ideas in my work.
2026
Alive
The hidden intelligence of the living world
A positive ontology arguing that living bodies are not passive matter but self-maintaining, purposive centres of activity, norms, and agency.
2021
How to Be Animal
What it means to be human
A diagnostic work that argues humans are animals whose awareness of vulnerability and death repeatedly drives them to imagine their real identity somewhere outside the body.
2011
On Extinction
How We Became Estranged from Nature
A loose environmental history of the Anthropocene, focusing in particular on the nostalgic impulse and our estrangement from the natural world.
2006
Stolen Voices
Young People's War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq
An epistolary history of twentieth-century conflict, told through the war diaries of children and young people from the First World War to Iraq.
Selected editions
Selected press
Reviews & podcasts2026
Instant Genius (BBC Science Focus)
How we define intelligent life – intelligence as embodied, purposeful, and arising from living organisms.
Podcast · Alive
2026
Planet: Critical
Being Alive – a brilliant exploration of aliveness, intelligence, and the physical meaning of being here.
Podcast · Alive
2026
New Scientist
What is life? A provocative new book sets out to redefine it – insisting on agency and purpose everywhere.
Review · Alive
2026
The Guardian
A maverick study of what it means to have a body – In this disorienting book, a poet argues we have been looking at nature, and ourselves, the wrong way.
Review · Alive
2023
The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times)
How Being Animal Could Help Us Be Better Humans – a wide-ranging conversation on animality, mortality, and AI.
Podcast · How to Be Animal
2021
The New York Review of Books
John Gray: The best critique of the myth of human exceptionalism I have read. Clearly and beautifully written, compellingly argued.
Review · How to Be Animal
2013
The New York Times
Ends of the Earth – Paul Greenberg on a strikingly peripatetic survey of extinction.
Review · On Extinction