Elaine Morgan – Year of election 2009

Elaine Morgan’s first career as a prolific television writer, lasting from 1955 to 1988, earned her a clutch of awards including two BAFTAs and, for the 1979 series Testament of Youth, designation as Writer of the Year by the Royal Television Society. In 1972 she caused a stir with her first book, The Descent of Woman – which was characterised as “a feminist tirade”, but also featured Alister Hardy's suggestion, made in 1960, of a possible semi-aquatic phase in the early stages of human evolution. Pursuing this idea has led Morgan ever deeper into controversy, combating the academic determination to dismiss the hypothesis as from science’s lunatic fringe, and her subsequent six books all dealt with natural selection. Last month she was appointed OBE for services to literature and education.

Having tried and failed to write a novel, Elaine Morgan says she sometimes suspects that what she is doing – “taking the path less travelled by” – is “simply opting for the easy way out. On the other hand it needed doing, and nobody else was doing it.”