Andrea Wulf Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Andrea Wulf
Andrea Wulf was born in New Delhi, India where she lived for the first five years of her life and moved to Germany where she grew up. Her parents were German developmental aid workers. Andrea studied at the University of Luneburg, and then design history at The Royal College of Art, London.

She has written for Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the LA Times, as well as many others.

Andrea has lectured all over the world. From the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London to Monticello and the New York Public Library in the US, and literary festivals across the world. She’s a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013, and is a 3 time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Andrea’s a member of PEN American Center and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

She’s a regular on TV and radio in the UK, the US, and in Germany. The ZDF/Smithsonian Humboldt documentary won the Discovery Award in 2019/ Science Film Festival. She was part of the delegation that accompanied Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his trip to Ecuador and Colombian, following in Humboldt’s footsteps.

“The Brother Gardeners” won the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award and a CBHL Annual Literature Award in 2010.

“Chasing Venus” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2012. This tells the extraordinary tale of the first global scientific collaboration, set amid the hurricanes, warring armies, personal tragedy, and scientific endeavor.

On June 6, 1761 and June 3, 1769 the planet Venus passed between Sun and Earth, and each time was visible as a tiny black dot against the burning face of the Sun for six hours. Transits of Venus always show up in pairs, eight years apart, however it then takes over a century for them to be seen again.

During the 1760s the world’s scientific community was electrified because the transit would allow for them the first time to calculate the distance between each planet in the solar system. It’d require triangulated data to be compiled from various different exact points each dotted all around the four corners of the globe, all of which are taken simultaneously during the short period of the actual Transit.

Hundreds of astronomers from European countries as well as the North American colonies were dispatched all across the world to observe the rare celestial encounter. At a time when war was ripping Europe, as well as much of the rest of the world apart, they overcame geographical, political, and intellectual boundaries.

Andrea Wulf tells “Chasing Venus” like a race across the world. Rich with stories of obsession, and featuring plagues, pirates, astronomers and scientists that include Ben Franklin and Catherine the Great. It bursts with wonderful detail, action, and scientific excitement, revealing the spirit of the Enlightenment and man’s quest to better understand the world.

“The Invention of Nature” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2015.“The Invention of Nature” reveals the extraordinary life of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the ways that we understand nature to this day. His name, even though it’s almost forgotten today, lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. He was the most famous scientist of his age and an intrepid explorer.

His restless life was jam packed with discovery and adventure, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world, racing through anthrax-infested Siberia, or paddling down the Orinoco. Perceiving nature as this interconnected global force, Humboldt found similarities between climate zones all around the world and predicted human induced climate change.

Humboldt turned scientific observation into poetic narrative, and his writings inspired poets and naturalists like Wordsworth, Darwin, and Goethe but politicians like Jefferson.

Wulf also argues that it was Humboldt’s influence which led John Muir to his ideas about preservation and which shaped Thoreau’s “Walden”. She traces his influences through the great minds that he inspired in ecology, evolution, revolution, art, conservation, and literature. This book brings this lost hero to science and the forgotten father of environmentalism back to life. After all, he was (as one contemporary said) the greatest man since the Deluge.

“The Invention of Nature” won the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Recognition of Excellence Award, the Inaugural James Wright Award for Nature Writing (Kenyon Review & Nature Conservancy), Royal Society Science Book Prize, the Acqui Storia Award 2017, and Costa Biography Award 2015. It also won the Ness Award 2016 from the Royal Geographical Society, was the QI Book of the Year Award winner, 2016, and the Dingle Prize British Society for the History of Science. It was published in 27 countries, was on Germany’s bestseller list for over three years, and has sold more than 700,000 copies around the world.

“Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2022. An exhilarating tale about this remarkable group of rebels that changed the way that we think about the world and ourselves.

Forget Paris. The real Revolution during the 1790s happened in Jena, this peaceful little German university town where the unlikely revolutionaries were not politicians or soldiers but actually playwrights and poets (Novalis, Goethe, and Schiller), literary critics (the contentious Schlegel brothers), philosophers (Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling), and scientists (Alexander von Humboldt). And at their heart was Caroline Schlegel, free spirited and formidable.

The Jena Set were the very first Romantics. And their unconventional lives were laboratories for their radical ideas, about the creative power of the self, the aspirations of science and art, nature, and the real meaning of freedom.

In “Magnificent Rebels, Wulf takes the reader on a vivid journey through all of their misadventures and adventures, epic quarrels, passionate love affairs, heartbreaks, and successes. All of us are still empowered by their daring jump into the self to this day. The French revolutionaries might’ve changed the political landscape, however these young Romantics incited this revolution of the mind which helped shaped our modern world.