MICHAEL BOND

I write books about human behaviour, and particularly about how people interact with each other and with the natural world. I used to be a science journalist, and for six years was senior editor at New Scientist. I have also written for Nature, Aeon, UnHerd, BBC Future, Slate, Prospect, The Observer, The Times, The FT, The New York Times and others. Until recently I taught writing as a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

 

My latest project is Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, published by Picador on 19 March 2026. It tells the story of our relationship with animals over the last 40,000 years, how living with animals shaped our brains and cultures, and the dramatic shift in our species' self-regard that transformed the way we treat them. Wild animals are almost completely absent from most people's lives, but they burn brightly in our dreams, hallucinations and psychopathologies, and in the tales we tell each other.

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Previously I wrote Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way (Picador, March 2020), a book about the psychology of getting lost, how our brains make cognitive maps and why some people are so much better at navigating than others. In North America this is published as From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way (Harvard University Press, May 2020).

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My other books are Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging (Picador, 2023); The Power of Others: Peer Pressure, Groupthink, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do (Oneworld, 2014), which won the British Psychological Society's book of the year award in 2015; and Way Out West (McClelland & Stewart, 2001), a travel biography about the settling of the Canadian prairies.

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