About Olivia Judson

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist, an award-winning writer, and an Earthist. Born in London, she moved to the United States when she was ten. As an undergraduate, she studied biology at Stanford University, before returning to the United Kingdom for her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford.

On completing her doctorate, she took a staff job writing about science for The Economist. She left The Economist to write her first book, Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, which has been translated into more than 15 languages and was also made into a television show starring Olivia as Dr Tatiana.

She has since written for a variety of publications including National Geographic, Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Natural History, Smithsonian, The Berliner, and The New York Times, where for two years she wrote a weekly online column. Her work for National Geographic sent her to Indonesia, where she spent a week scuba diving in search of octopuses—she was lucky enough to see the rare and little-known “hairy octopus”—and to Antarctica, where she spent two weeks camping on Mount Erebus, the planet’s most southerly active volcano.

Her new book, The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth, will be published on 1 December 2026 by Penguin Press in the United States and on 28 January 2027 by John Murray in the United Kingdom. The Dutch edition was published by Uitgeverij Balans on 15 September 2026. French, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Russian, and Korean editions are forthcoming.

In 2010–2011, Olivia was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, an institute for advanced study. In 2018, she was a journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, also in Berlin. In 2020, Olivia was the recipient of an award from the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation; she has also received an award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London and a visiting scholar at the Freie Universität Berlin.

She loves walking in nature and looking at mammals, birds, insects, and trees; she also loves snorkeling and looking at fish, crabs, octopuses, jellyfishes, and other inhabitants of the seas. She likes to take a long walk every day, plays squash enthusiastically but poorly, and enjoys a variety of movement practices, including yoga, Pilates, and Feldenkrais. She avoids eating food with added sugar, loves visiting natural history museums, and is an avid reader. She lives with her husband in Berlin.