“Leviathan rising: how the whales became what we wanted them to be,” a lecture by Philip Hoare

About the Talk

Taking the recent and astonishing killer whale interactions with vessels in the eastern Atlantic as his cue, as well as his own experience at the center of just such an event, devoted “whalehead,” author and curator Philip Hoare uses archive images and his own dreams to chart the way the whale has changed in response to our need. If we interrupt their alien culture with our own, what then? Ambassadors of the natural world, apex predators doing their thing, or mutating animatronic future-beings: which whales will we choose next, now that it’s down to the wire and down to the deep?

About the Speaker

Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including Leviathan, or the Whale, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson prize. He is co-curator of the Moby Dick Big Read, and professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton, UK, and regular visitor to Cape Cod. In 2023 his reports and essays on orca interventions have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and in podcasts for the Guardian, VICE, and Al-Jazeera. Read more in the author’s Guardian profile.