Jenny Odell
New York Times-bestselling author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time
Ed Yong
Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author of An Immense World
Named "the most important and impactful journalist" of 2020 by Poynter, Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong is the bestselling author of An Immense World. In 2021, he was awarded journalism's top honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for his crucial coverage of the pandemic—a beat that left him struggling with mental health challenges and burnout. Now, he talks about a new passion, birdwatching, and the positive impact of nature on mental health. An accomplished speaker, Yong brings his vast scientific knowledge and engages his audiences through his insightful conversations about the animal kingdom, the challenges of science journalism, and the joys of the natural world.
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About Ed Yong
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter whose fascinating presentations on animals and the natural world are infused with humor, joy, wonder, and infectious enthusiasm. His New York Times-bestselling book, An Immense World, is an astounding tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world. Yong dives into each animal’s umwelt—their specific “sensory bubble”—with curiosity and awe, exploring how different senses like heat, sound, smell, and echolocation inform how animals interact with their surroundings.
After years of pandemic reporting left him burnt out and struggling with his mental health, Yong turned to a new hobby—birdwatching—to help him heal and reconnect with his original beat of nature writing. In birdwatching, Yong found a much deeper connection to the natural world. Now, Yong speaks about how exploring your environment can be restorative as well as informative.
A New York Times bestseller, An Immense World won the Andrew Carnegie Medal, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and was longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Award, as well as appearing on many Best Books of the Year lists. A beautiful, full-color adaptation of An Immense World for young readers will be published in 2025.
Ed Yong is also the bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us, a groundbreaking, informative, and entertaining examination of the relationship between animals and microbes. He won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Exemplary Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic, as well as the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical-science reporting; the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. In 2024, Yong was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for his trailblazing science writing. A longtime science reporter for The Atlantic, his work has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American, among others.
Contact us about booking Ed Yong for your next event.
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Speaking Topics
The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses
In this engaging lecture based on his book, An Immense World, Yong takes audiences through the hidden realms of animal senses. With wit and humor, learn the amazing ways in which animals perceive aspects of the world to which we are oblivious, and how appreciating the natural world leads us to better understand empathy
Becoming a Birder
"It's easy to think of birding as an escape from reality. Instead, I see it as immersion in the true reality."
In this talk, Ed Yong shares how he became a birder and how birdwatching fosters joy, wonder, and connection to the world around you.
The Art of Science Journalism
Yong explores the core of what it means to be a science journalist, how inseparable science is from the rest of society, and how it is shaped by our culture, our social norms, and our collective decisions.
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Video
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Praise for Ed Yong
Praise for An Immense World
A thrilling tour of nonhuman perception . . . Nature’s true wonders aren’t limited to a remote wilderness or other sublime landscape. . . . There is as much grandeur in the soil of a backyard garden as there is in the canyons of Zion.
— The New York TimesA dazzling ride through the sensory world of astoundingly sophisticated creatures . . . It’s Mr. Yong’s task to expand our thinking, to rouse our sense of wonder, to help us feel humbled and exalted at the capabilities of our fellow inhabitants on Earth. . . . [A] deeply affectionate travelogue of animal sensory wonders.
— The Wall Street JournalOne of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction . . . Yong’s reporting is layered, seasoned with vivid scenes from laboratories and in the field, interviews with researchers across a spectrum of disciplines.
— Oprah DailyYong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world.
— NPREd Yong has the collector’s keen eye for the unusual, crossed with the journalist’s nose for how to tell a beguilingly good story. Which is to say, he is the perfect person to take this deep dive into the astonishing parallel universes around us inhabited by other animals. Chasing an understanding of their sensory worlds, Yong shares a gaze with a jumping spider, is oripulated by a manatee, and takes a punch from a mantis shrimp. Though we have noses too blunt to see the world, our eyes are tuned to only a fraction of light, and we can’t sense magnetic or electrical fields, An Immense World gives us the next best thing: appreciation for those who can. Yong expands our world as he lets us see into others’.
— Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and KnowA cornucopia of wonders about the transcendent modalities by which other animals perceive: snakes with their stereo-olfactory tongues, killer flies with their high-speed vision, knifefishes that electrolocate their prey, and so much more . . . It’s all a fascinating reminder of the humbling truth that most of what happens among life forms on Earth is beyond our ken.
— David Quammen, author of The Tangled TreePraise for I Contain Multitudes
Yong just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best.
— Bill GatesBeyond fascinating. An amazing book. It’ll change the way you think about the world. It'll change who you think you are.”
— Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for HawkEd Yong is a talented British science writer...I Contain Multitudes, his first book, covers a huge amount of microscopic territory in clear, strong, often epigrammatic prose… He is infectiously enthusiastic about microbes, and he describes them with verve.
— New York Times Book ReviewThe author wonderfully turns to the humanities again and again to enrich the book’s scientific detail... And he’s funny.
— Wall Street JournalFrom his vibrant introduction to the witty endnotes, Yong’s expertise and narration hold no less wonder than a sacred text. Yong’s prose is alive with an almost incredulous pleasure that the field he has loved since childhood is now in vogue.
— SpectatorEd Yong’s beautiful, smart, and sometimes shocking new book…
— WiredFor a lesser writer, the temptation to oversimplify the science or to sex up unwarranted conclusions might have proved irresistible. Mr Yong expertly avoids these pitfalls. No matter. Mr Yong has no need for such hype. I Contain Multitudes bowls along wonderfully without it. His hero, Sir David [Attenborough], would surely approve.
— The EconomistIt is a page-turner in a very old-fashioned sense. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed.
— GuardianA delightful, witty book… he does not just tell the stories of microbiomes, he also introduces readers to dozens of the scientists studying them. Their stories and conversations radiate the excitement of unlocking new secrets, putting a human face on the science.
— ScienceEd Yong is one of our finest young explainers of science-wicked smart, broadly informed, sly, savvy, so illuminating. And this is an encyclopedia of fascinations.
— David Quammen, author of Spillover and Song of the DodoA marvelous book! Ed Yong s brilliant gift for storytelling and precise writing about science converge in I Contain Multitudes to make the invisible and tiny both visible and mighty.
— Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach TrilogyEd Yong has written a riveting account of the microbes that make the world work. I Contain Multitudes will change the way you look at yourself and just about everything else.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionI Contain Multitudes changes you the way all great science writing does. You become disoriented, looking at the world around you in a new way. With vivid tales and graceful explanations, Ed Yong reveals how the living things we see around us are wildly complex collectives.
— Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite RexEd Yong has done something beautiful, and unlikely: he’s rendered the unseen world of bacteria thrilling, captivating and highly entertaining. This is a much-needed guide to the hidden kingdom that dominates life on Earth. It cuts through all the hype of microbiomes with a scientifically steady hand, but told with an infectious sense of awe.
— Adam Rutherford, author of CreationYong has captured the essence of this exciting field, expressing the enthusiasm and wonder that the scientific community feels when working with the microbiome.
— Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago -
Books by Ed Yong
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Featured Title
An Immense World
“One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily
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