Laura Spinney

Laura Spinney discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Laura Spinney is a writer and science journalist. Her writing on science has appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, Nature and National Geographic, among others. She is the author of two novels, The Doctor (2001) and The Quick (2007), and a collection of oral history, Rue Centrale (2013). Her bestselling non-fiction account of the 1918 flu pandemic, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (2017), was translated into more than 20 languages. Her latest book, Proto: How Once Ancient Language Went Global, the story of the Indo-European languages, appeared in 2025. She lives in Paris.

1. Osmothèque – international perfume archive in Versailles. Conserves 4,000 perfumes, of which 800 have “disappeared”

2. Studs Terkel. Legendary American broadcaster, writer, actor and historian

3. Circus elephants, or rather their owner-handlers. A dying breed, as they should be, but they deserve our compassion and respect

4. Papuan languages. Nearly 900 of them, vast majority of which are undocumented

5. Gloria! 2024 Italian-Swiss film, directorial debut of Margherita Vicario

6. Marija Gimbutas. Lithuanian-born archaeologist who got it right on the word's largest language family, Indo-European

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