Author of the week: E.O. Wilson

last updated 8 January 2015

E.O. Wilson might seem too accomplished in his own field to try his hand at a novel, said Margaret Atwood in The New York Review of Books. The renowned biologist, a Harvard professor emeritus and two-time Pulitzer winner, has already written many books that changed the way we look at human behavior, at the health of the planet, and, especially, at ants. Those six-legged creatures were Wilson’s first scholarly passion, and he’s now given them their Iliad. Wilson’s novel, Anthill, is an unusual hybrid of a book: It centers on an epic ant war that takes place in an area the size of a tennis court. But it works. “I wanted,” Wilson says, “to try something I don’t believe any novelist has ever done.”

Wilson’s biggest risk was trying to make readers care as much about that small plot of land as they do about the novel’s human protagonist, said Deborah Treisman in NewYorker.com. The ants’ behavior is rooted in real science: Rival colonies mount martial tournaments; adult ants leave their offspring at nurseries and bury their dead in cemeteries. The “one real stretch,” Wilson says, is that he has endowed his fictional ants with a richer range of emotions than biologists have detected. Wilson says it’s unlikely that he’ll write a second novel, but he’s hopeful that his foray into fiction might find readers he’s not yet reached otherwise. “Maybe you shouldn’t mention that I’m 80 years old,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to read a novel by an 80-year-old.”