4th Estate

Tim Radford is a freelance journalist. He was born in New Zealand in 1940 and educated at Sacred Heart College, Auckland. He joined the New Zealand Herald as a reporter at 16, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1961. Apart from a brief spell as a Whitehall information officer, he has spent all his life in weekly, evening or daily newspapers. He worked for The Guardian for 32 years, becoming, among other things, letters editor, arts editor, literary editor and science editor. He won the Association of British Science Writers award for science writer of the year four times. He served on the UK committee for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. He has lectured about science and the media in Madrid, Santiago, Barcelona, Brussels, Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Bonn, The Hague, Monaco, Stockholm, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik, Auckland, Wellington, Moscow and Krasnoyarsk as well as many British cities. He has written for The Lancet, New Scientist, the London Review of Books and many other journals. He has also written one book, The Crisis of Life On Earth (1990), and edited two books of science writing for the Guardian. He was on the judging panel of the Science (now Aventis) Prize in 1990, and of the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2002. He is married with two children and one grandchild