LITERARY FESTIVAL
TAKING OUT THE STING Wasps, compared to beloved counterparts bees, seem to be universally maligned – even though they beat them to existence by 100 million years and carry out vital pollination. It’s an entrenched attitude Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioural ecology at University College London, is trying to budge. “The reason we don’t like wasps is because we don’t really have a good understanding of what they do,” says Seirian. “People looking for something that’s unattractive and unpopular – they come back to wasps all the time.” Through her first non-academic work, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps , Seirian is hoping to persuade readers otherwise. “I’ve wanted to write a book for about ten years, and have always had a vested interest in trying to break down those barriers between scientists and the public,” she says on her various projects, as well as talks, which spread the word about wasps. “The power of a bit of information could persuade people that they should be looking more favourably on these insects. I realised I could change people’s perceptions, but didn’t want to be doing that one village hall at a time.”
SEIRIAN SUMNER 20 November 2pm
CREATING A BUZZ Seirian’s book aims to change perceptions about our summertime adversaries
WOMAN’S WORK “My fiction has women’s unheard and under-heard stories at the heart of it,” says Kate Mosse, co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, on her latest non-fiction book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World . “This is a lifetime’s work, really, but it’s the first book I’ve written like this – mostly, I put it all into my fiction. That’s why this particular book is a labour of love.” The idea for the tome emerged from Lady into Woman (1953), detailing the lives of women forgotten by history, which Kate discovered in a second-hand bookstore. Reading it got her mental cogs turning over several years, though it was the onset of lockdown and her #WomanInHistory campaign – where she called on people to share their favourite female figures from the past – that consolidated the concept. The prolific author of the Labyrinth and Burning Chambers series then took the opportunity to learn more about another influential writer, her great-grandmother, Lily Watson. This personal journey provides the framework for a book which captures the lives of over 1,000 pioneering women, stretching from the 23rd century BCE to the present day. “I knew there was somebody in my family who wrote, and that was how it was always described, but I discovered that
Seirian’s background was initially in behavioural science, but she was unexpectedly called upon for fieldwork in Malaysia on wasps. A whole 25 years later, the insect still has her hooked. “Sometimes I think: am I a bit strange?” she laughs. Teeming with literary references, including a chapter on Aristotle – who wrote about wasps’ inferiority to bees 2,400 years ago – Seirian’s book is a far throw from her academic papers. “I found it really liberating,” she says. “When you’re writing an academic paper, you’ve always got what we call ‘reviewer number two’ sitting on your shoulder, who you know is going to come back with awful criticism. Writing this book felt like it was actually my choice what goes in – it’s my voice, my story.” The Secret World of Wasps comes amid a surge in interest in natural histories, such as Entangled Life . “I was surprised that my book was ending up in that classification, and at first I was slightly offended because I’m a scientist,” muses Seirian. “But now I realise that this is a really exciting time to be writing about the interface of science and nature. There’s this growing awareness from the public that we need to learn more about nature and understand it, so that we can care for it. Without natural history, there would be no science, and it’s only by observing nature and being curious that we can ask the right scientific questions.”
Everything we have as women is there because somebody has fought for it
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK NOVEMBER 2022 29
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