Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a background spanning plant science, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He earned a PhD in tropical ecology at the University of Cambridge, studying underground fungal networks in Panama as a predoctoral fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He also presented the documentary Fungi: Web of Life.

His nonfiction brings experimental biology into conversation with larger questions about individuality, intelligence, and cooperation. In Entangled Life, mushrooms are only the visible beginning. Sheldrake follows mycelial networks beneath forests, examines fungi that manipulate insects, and considers the yeasts behind fermentation. The writing combines scientific explanation with fieldwork, history, and philosophical inquiry.

Published in 2020, Entangled Life was his first book. It won the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. An illustrated edition, abridged by Sheldrake and featuring more than one hundred color images, followed.

Entangled Life is the natural starting point and the book listed on WebToTell. It works for readers with no specialist knowledge while retaining the strangeness of its subject. Begin there for an expansive introduction to fungi and for Sheldrake’s central argument: familiar ideas about organisms become less stable once fungal relationships come into view.