Yuval Noah Harari

Biography

Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of history and is the author of two of the most acclaimed and influential books of recent times in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. His work, putting the history of humanity in a wider yet comprehensible context, has been praised by politicians, business leaders, academics and critics alike.

After studying medieval and military history in the UK and his native Israel, Yuval published a range of books and articles covering conflict and war from medieval to recent times. He then specialised in global history from where he went on to write Sapiens. The groundbreaking book looks at humanity from its earliest origins through the development of societies, nation states, religion and technology. It became a global best-seller, translated into 40 languages.

The follow-up, Homo Deus, built on how humanity has developed to project into the future. If Sapiens described how humanity mastered the world with ideas like freedom, money and god, what happens when humans themselves become godlike – all-powerful, all-knowing, life-giving beings?

Merging anthropology, history, contemporary philosophy and technology, Professor Harari has created work that is accessible, relevant, and instructive. He covers how humanity developed into the most powerful species on the planet, both by design and by accident. From agriculture to storytelling to science, he looks at key turning points in evolution and asks what we can understand from that. He further considers how humanity’s story might continue with technology influencing everything, and particularly advances in biotech and AI, and whether they hold the next step in the evolution of homo sapiens.

Yuval considers how tenuous humanity’s dominance is, and what can be learned about the future from our shared history. Challenging ideas of what humans are and what they might become, his work has won awards around the world and has been praised by global leaders including Bill Gates and Barak Obama.