The Pebble in My Pocket A History of Our Earth

About Meredith Hooper

Award-winning Australian author, Meredith Hooper, will be one of the keynote speakers at the Australian Woman of the Year in the UK Award reception in London on 6 March 2008.
Meredith Hooper is a prolific Australian author. Born and educated in Adelaide, Meredith received her first degree from the University of Adelaide, before travelling to Oxford on an international scholarship to complete postgraduate studies in imperial history. She then travelled with her English husband to the United States and Canada, where she wrote a history of America for English school children and began research on her first best-seller, Everyday Inventions.
Since then, Meredith has published over 70 books, across a wide variety of subject areas, including history (including Australian history), science, technology, exploration and Egyptology, as well as novels. Her works include books for children and for adults, winning a number of international awards and short listings.
Meredith Hooper became a Visiting Scholar in the history of science and technology at the prestigious Royal Institution in London and was the first woman on the editorial board of The Round Table – the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, where she still remains a Trustee.
A strong strand of Meredith Hooper's non-fiction book writing has been making science and technology accessible to non-specialists. Combined with her training as an historian, she has focused much of her writing during the last fifteen years on Antarctica, a continent where humans are visitors only, and animals are the indigenous inhabitants. Selected to work as a writer in Antarctica by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, and the US National Science Program Office of Polar Programs, she has lived during three summers on science bases, and travelled extensively on US and Australian research vessels, and with the UK ice patrol vessel HMS Endurance. In 2000 she was awarded the Antarctic Service Medal by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the US Congress.
Her most recent title ‘The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica’ (Profile Books, 2007), is an eye-witness account of the front-line of climate change, working with US seabird ecologists at America's smallest Antarctic research base, Palmer Station, on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on earth. The impact on the local penguins is profound. ‘The Ferocious Summer’ describes the summer scientists now signal as a tipping point. ‘The Ferocious Summer’ was named the 2007 Daily Mail Science Book of the Year.