Authors Like Yuval Noah Harari

H. G. Wells

British · The Time Machine (1895), The Outline of History (1920)

Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866 and was already famous for scientific romances such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (1898) when he turned to world history after the First World War. The Outline of History appeared in fortnightly parts from November 1919 and as a single volume in 1920, and sold more than two million copies. In 1927 the Canadian writer Florence Deeks sued him, claiming he had copied her unpublished manuscript; the courts, up to the Privy Council, dismissed her case.

Jared Diamond

American · Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005)

Diamond was born in Boston in 1937 and trained in physiology before turning to evolutionary biology and geography. Guns, Germs, and Steel asks why Eurasian societies came to dominate others and answers with geography, crops and domesticable animals rather than any difference between peoples; it won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Many historians and anthropologists have criticised his arguments, and a 2009 defamation suit over his New Yorker article on revenge in Papua New Guinea was withdrawn in 2013.

Peter Frankopan

British · The Silk Roads (2015), The Earth Transformed (2023)

Frankopan was born in London in 1971 and is Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford. The Silk Roads retells world history from Central Asia and the Middle East outward, following the routes along which goods, religions and diseases travelled. The Earth Transformed follows the relationship between climate and human societies from the earliest times to the present.

Karen Armstrong

British · A History of God (1993), The Great Transformation (2006)

Armstrong was born in Worcestershire in 1944, entered a Catholic convent at seventeen and left in 1969, which she described in Through the Narrow Gate (1981). A History of God traces how Judaism, Christianity and Islam imagined God over four thousand years; The Great Transformation follows the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged in the period known as the Axial Age. She won the TED Prize in 2008.

Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American · Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, spent part of his childhood in occupied France, and with Amos Tversky studied the mental shortcuts behind human judgement; he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002. Thinking, Fast and Slow sets out two systems of thought, one quick and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate. Some studies in its chapter on priming later failed to replicate, which he acknowledged in 2017. He died in 2024.

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Robert Sapolsky

American · Behave (2017), Determined (2023)

Sapolsky was born in New York in 1957 and is a neuroendocrinologist at Stanford who spent years studying baboons in Kenya, which he described in A Primate’s Memoir (2001). Behave explains a single human act by moving back in time, from the second before it to the hormones, childhood, culture and evolution behind it. Determined argues that free will does not exist.

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Shoshana Zuboff

American · In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)

Zuboff was born in 1951 and is a professor emerita at Harvard Business School. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues that companies such as Google and Facebook turn human experience into behavioural data, which they use to predict and shape what people do.

Rutger Bregman

Dutch · Utopia for Realists (2014), Humankind (2019)

Bregman was born in the Netherlands in 1988 and made his name as a historian and journalist at De Correspondent. Humankind, published in Dutch in 2019 as De meeste mensen deugen and in English in 2020, argues that most people are fundamentally decent, and revisits famous evidence to the contrary, from the Stanford prison experiment to the collapse of Easter Island. In 2019 a clip of him telling a Davos panel to talk about taxes went viral.

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Rebecca Wragg Sykes

British · Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (2020)

Wragg Sykes is a Palaeolithic archaeologist who lives in Wales. Kindred draws on recent finds and laboratory techniques to describe how Neanderthals made tools, ate, cared for one another and treated their dead. It won the 2021 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history and the 2021 Current Archaeology Book of the Year award.

David Graeber

American · Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Dawn of Everything (2021, with David Wengrow)

Graeber was an anthropologist, born in New York in 1961, who taught at the London School of Economics and was involved in Occupy Wall Street. Debt traces credit and obligation back five thousand years. The Dawn of Everything, written with the archaeologist David Wengrow and published in 2021, the year after Graeber’s death, argues that early humans tried many forms of social organisation, and its opening chapter names Harari among the popular writers whose story of human progress it disputes.