A solo female author has emerged for the first time ever in 28 years as the winner of the most esteemed science book prize in Britain.
The Royal Society Winton prize for Science Books awarded £25,000 (around $38,000) to Gaia Vince, a former London-based journalist, for her work on gathering first-hand accounts of the environmental changes caused by human activity throughout the globe.
Vince spent 800 days on the road collecting information for her book Adventures in the Anthropocene: a Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. The book centers on how people from different parts of the world have developed creative, albeit desperate, solutions to the most critical ecological issues during what scientists call the Anthropocene.
Vince described the Anthropocene as a period of time in which human activity has become a massive geological force that has extensively altered the environment.
Chair of the panel, Professor Ian Stewart, was impressed with Vince's tenacity and dedication, calling her book as an original and essential work. Sarah Waters, novelist and judge, said that Vince's book was a testament to human ingenuity.
The book described the environmental conditions found in the poorest areas such as the slums in Colombia and the silver mines in Bolivia. Vince also met a man in the Caribbean who had built timber houses on an island made from garbage.
Vince's partner, Nick Pattinson, photographed images such as manmade glaciers created by an Indian civil engineer, and the Andes being painted white by Peruvians to cool it down.
Shortlisted titles for the award were Life's Greatest Secret (Profile) by Matthew Cobb, Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life (Bloomsbury) by Alex Bellos, Smashing Physics (Headline) by John Butterworth, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Bantam Press) by Johnjoe Mcfadden and Professor Jim Al-Khalili, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop (Picador) by David Adam.
The prize ceremony held at the Royal Society in London has included past winners such as Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Steve Jones and Jared Diamond. Another woman who had won the prestigious prize in 1997 was Pat Shipman, co-author of Alan Walker on a book on dinosaurs called The Wisdom of Bones.
