Neurotribes by Steve Silberman takes £20,000 award for book ‘arguing that we should stop drawing sharp lines between normal and abnormal’

Steve Silberman’s investigation into autism, Neurotribes, has become the first popular science book to win the Samuel Johnson prize, praised by judges of the prestigious non-fiction award for “inject[ing] a hopeful note into a conversation that’s normally dominated by despair”.



Working for Wired magazine, Silberman first began to look into the topic when he discovered that two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs he had interviewed had autistic children. Telling a friend about “this curious synchronicity” in a cafe, a special-education teacher at the next table overheard, and informed him: “There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.”

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Neurotribes is his exploration of the rise in diagnoses, tracing the history of the disorder, from the clinicians who discovered it in 1943 to the controversy around the MMR vaccine, as well as exploring its impact on families, and the growing “neurodiversity” movement. Chair of judges Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer-winning historian and journalist, said the book is a “tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research, both scholarly and widely accessible”.

Ian Sample interviews Steve Silberman on the Guardian science podcast. Click here to listen to the full podcast

Most importantly, said Applebaum, the judges admired Silberman’s work “because it is powered by a strongly argued set of beliefs: that we should stop drawing sharp lines between what we assume to be ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and that we should remember how much the differently-wired human brain has, can and will contribute to our world,” said Applebaum. “He has injected a hopeful note into a conversation that’s normally dominated by despair.”

Neurotribes beat shortlisted titles including Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes, which has proved controversial following complaints from the poet’s widow Carol Hughes, Robert Macfarlane’s look at language and landscapes, Landmarks, and Emma Sky’s The Unravelling, about her time in Iraq as a civilian volunteer and, later, a political adviser.

Steve Silberman's Neurotribes is the book 'families affected by autism have long deserved' Read more

Previous winners of the £20,000 award include Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad; Philip Hoare’s Leviathan or, the Whale; and last year Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. But Silberman’s book is the first popular science title to win the prize in its 17-year history.

“Silberman’s compassionate journalism explores the impact of popular culture on perceptions of autism, and the impact of autism on the families of those who live with it,” said Applebaum. “Silberman also excels at using stories and anecdotes to explain complex medical issues to a wide audience.”

Applebaum was joined on the judging panel by the editor of Intelligent Life Emma Duncan; the editor of New Scientist Sumit Paul-Choudhury; the director of the China Centre at Oxford University, Professor Rana Mitter; and film executive Tessa Ross. While Applebaum has said that the meeting to pick the shortlist was “truly contentious; it’s hard to imagine how five people sitting in a room on a weekday morning could have disagreed more strongly”, picking their overall winner was “not a bitter debate”.

“We had a very diverse shortlist,” she said. “Each in its own category is superior – the Jonathan Bate is clearly a brilliant biography; Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island is a brilliant piece of journalism. But in the end we went with the book we felt would have the widest impact, and which represented in my view a transcendence of genre.”

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Neurotribes, she said, “is a combination of different kinds of non-fiction techniques. He takes a problem and looks at it from different angles. So this is a book about autism, but it is also about the human brain … about how we look at people who are different.”

And it is, she said, “deeply original – a wonderful piece of storytelling which is deeply researched and powerful in its message.”

“The conversation about autism is often very depressing, but Neurotribes ends on a very hopeful note about how to think differently about this condition. It is a very moving book,” she said.

Applebaum brushed away criticism of the judges’ longlist for including just one book by a female writer, Sky’s The Unravelling, a move that has since helped to prompt the launch of the Virago New Statesman Women’s Prize for Politics & Economics.

“It’s just fate,” she said. “A woman won last year and the year before, and there were three women judges. When we were picking books, we weren’t thinking along those lines. We were picking 12 books out of 500 [and] I think we had a huge range of diversity in terms of genres, and the backgrounds of the writers. So it is diverse in other ways – that’s how the cookie crumbles.”