Draft:Melanie Challenger

Melanie Challenger is a writer, researcher and broadcaster on environmental history and philosophy of science, Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and a Vice President of the RSPCA, UK. She wrote How to Be Animal: What it Means to Be Human (2021).

Her first non-fiction book On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature was published in 2011. It was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 and received the Santa Barbara Library’s Green Award for environmental writing.

She is a member of CEP, a new global collective of environmental philosophers and a founding member of the Animals in the Room project, involved in devising new models for representing the interests of non-human animals in decisions critical to their lives.

Early work
Challenger began her career in the arts, writing poetry and libretto. She has published two collections of poetry, Galatea, which won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and a second collection, The Tender Map was published in 2017.

In 2003, she adapted the Anne Frank diaries for a choral work by James Whitbourn. As the librettist for British composer Mark Simpson, she provided the text for his oratorio, The Immortal, which won the 2016 South Bank Sky Arts Award for classical music and received its London premiere at the 2017 BBC Proms under Juanjo Mena. Their first opera together, Pleasure, was co-commissioned by Royal Opera House, Opera North and Aldeburgh Music.