The Royal Society has revealed its shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015, an international book prize that honors science writing for a non-specialist audience.
“While these books vary widely in their subject matter, they all excel at telling the human story, making science accessible and real without dumbing it down,” stated Ian Stewart, chair of judges. “Whether it’s through Gaia Vince’s reports of her ecological Adventures in the Anthropocene, finding out what it’s like to work at the Large Hadron Collider in Smashing Physics, or Bellos’s infectious enthusiasm in Alex Through the Looking-Glass, these books provide wonderfully engaging entry routes into complex topics.”
The winner will be announced on September 24 at an awards ceremony in the U.K. The winner will take home £25,000 (approximately $39,000), and the other five shortlisted finalists will receive £2500 (approximately $3,900). We’ve got the complete shortlist after the jump.
Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015 Shortlist
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop by David Adam (Picador)
Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury)
Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment by Jon Butterworth (Headline)
Life’s Greatest Secret: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb (Profile)
Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe Mcfadden and Professor Jim Al-Khalili (Bantam Press)
Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made by Gaia Vince (Chatto & Windus)