The project,
and its detours

My first lab was my back garden. I published my first poem, on captive polar bears, as a child in my local newspaper.

I swithered between doing anthropology and archaeology or English Literature and Language, but eventually studied the latter at Oxford University.

I worked in opera education immediately after university, and spent hours in the Bodleian reading voraciously across information theory, ecology, history, and art theory. I think I was trying to figure out what matters.

I began writing and publishing poetry in my twenties. My first collection, Galatea, received an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

I moved between those two impulses: entering experience imaginatively, and standing back to ask what sort of creature the human being is.

At the same time I became involved in projects concerned with violence, testimony, and memory. I collaborated with a number of organisations, including Amnesty International and the Imperial War Museum.

I worked on Annelies, James Whitbourn's setting of Anne Frank's diary, and co-edited Stolen Voices, an anthology of young people's wartime diaries, with my friend Zlata Filipović, who had survived the Siege of Sarajevo.

Working so closely with survivors of human atrocities, and also with the words of the dead, profoundly altered me and my direction.

I spent a lot of time in New York between 2005 and 2006 involved, among other things, with the Harold Clurman Center on Poetry and Poetics. In 2007 I received a Darwin Now Award for research in the Canadian Arctic, followed by an International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for work on the history of whaling.

From 2007 to 2010 I was a Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. That research became On Extinction, a book about extinction, memory, and the ideas that shaped humanity's changing relationship with the natural world. It was named one of Publishers Weekly's best nonfiction books of 2012 and received the Santa Barbara Library's Green Award for environmental writing.

Over the following decade, my work moved increasingly towards questions of embodiment, animality, and the nature of living beings. How to Be Animal examined the difficulty humans have in accepting their animal nature, and the ways awareness of vulnerability and death has shaped philosophy, religion, society, and technology.

Alongside the writing, I began to focus on bioethics and the history and philosophy of science. I have been a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, a visiting fellow in the Philosophy Department at Durham University, and an affiliate of the Hastings Center for bioethics.

In 2019 I joined the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, where I became Deputy Co-Chair and co-chair of its priority area on environment and health. I edited Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Nonhuman Existence in 2023 and, in the same year, became a Vice President of the RSPCA.

Throughout this time, I continued writing poems and working on opera projects with composer Mark Simpson. Together we were 2013 Jerwood Opera fellows.

Researched across six years, my latest book Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World brought these interests together in an enquiry into the origins of agency and intelligence. In 2025, I became a National Geographic Explorer.