Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic, where his work has fundamentally shaped public understanding of biology, ecology, and the hidden complexity of life. Born in Malaysia and raised in Britain, Yong has spent his career finding the stories inside science that change how people see themselves and the world around them. He is the author of two landmark books: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (2016), a New York Times bestseller that introduced millions of readers to the microbiome, and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2022), which won both the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, was named a top ten book of the year by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and People, and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. An Immense World was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. Yong won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic, along with the George Polk Award for science reporting. In 2024 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is based in Oakland, California.
Why Their Voice Matters
Ed Yong has done something rare: he has taken two of the most disorienting ideas in modern science—that we are not individuals but ecosystems, and that other animals inhabit sensory worlds we cannot imagine—and made them feel not threatening but liberating. In I Contain Multitudes, he dismantles the story of the isolated self, revealing that the boundaries we draw between “us” and the microbial world are largely fiction. In An Immense World, he goes further, showing that the reality we perceive is just one thin slice of a planet alive with sensation, communication, and intelligence at every scale. Together, these books make the case that human exceptionalism—the assumption that our way of experiencing the world is the standard—is not just scientifically wrong but impoverishing. For readers navigating the great transition from separation to interconnection, from dominance to partnership, Yong offers something more powerful than argument: he offers wonder. His writing doesn’t tell us we need to change our relationship with the living world—it makes us feel, viscerally, that we were never as separate from it as we thought.
