The award-winning bestselling author, Andrea Wulf, presents the extraordinary life of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in the lecture hall of the Abbe Center Beutenberg - the visionary scientist and intrepid explorer after whom more plants, animals and places are named than after anyone else. His restless life was packed with adventures and voyages of discovery: he climbed the world's highest volcanoes, combed the rainforests and traveled through anthrax-infested Siberia. His descriptions of nature inspired both scientists and poets, such as Darwin and Goethe, as well as politicians like Jefferson and Bolivar. Humboldt explained nature as a complex "web of life" and as a global force in which everything is connected to everything else - a concept that still shapes our thinking today. He saw nature as a living organism that is vulnerable and warned of man-made climate change as early as 1800. Andrea Wulf sheds light not only on the universal genius, but also on Alexander von Humboldt the man and establishes links to the here and now.
Andrea Wulf, born in India and raised in Germany, lives in London. As an author, she has received numerous international awards, most notably for her global bestseller "Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature" (2016), which has been translated into 27 languages and won the highly prestigious Costa Biography Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the Bavarian Book Prize in Germany, among others. Her latest book "Fabulous Rebels. The Early Romantics and the Invention of the Self" is a Spiegel bestseller. She writes for the New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic and the Guardian, among others. She is a member of the PEN American Center and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
The lecture will be followed by a book signing in the foyer of the Abbe Center Beutenberg from around 20:00.
