A passionate science advocate: best-selling US author Bill Bryson. Image courtesy of the Royal Society.
Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain.
His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award.
He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
His last critically lauded bestseller was At Home: a Short History of Private Life and his most recent book, One Summer: America 1927 chronicles a forgotten summer when America came of age and changed the world for ever.
He was born in the American Midwest, and lives in the UK.
It is over a decade since popular US author Bill Bryson embarked on his eye-opening journey of research for the acclaimed science book ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. At that time, he could never have envisaged the popularity and esteem his book would be held in today.
With Bryson’s impeccable wit, charm and honesty, he managed to open up a world of science that was accessible and revealing in equal measure. And yet, in writing the book, Bryson was faced with narrative adjustments and the trepidation of not knowing many of the fields he intended to cover.