Richard Fortey – Year of election 2010

Richard Fortey, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum, is an exceptional writer about science.  His first book, The Hidden Landscape, was Natural World Book of the Year; Life was short-listed for the Rhone-Poulenc Prize; and Trilobite! was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize.  He has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing (2003) and the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize for public communication of science in 2006.  Fortey also has a great interest in literature, especially poetry. As one critic has put it, he combines “a scientist’s regard for fact with a poet’s delight in wonder.”