Researcher
Merlin Sheldrake
Biologist & author of Entangled Life · b. 1987
The biologist whose 2020 bestseller Entangled Life carried the strange, sprawling life of fungi to a global audience — and helped make a whole generation curious about mushrooms, mycelium, and the minds they touch.
Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss.
The book that changed the conversation
Few people have done more to make fungi interesting to ordinary readers than Merlin Sheldrake. A Cambridge-trained biologist with a PhD in tropical ecology — earned studying the underground fungal networks of Panama’s forests — he turned a decade in the dirt into Entangled Life (2020), a book that reads like an adventure and sold like one, winning the Royal Society’s science-book prize and pulling mycology into the mainstream.1
Why he belongs here
Sheldrake is not a psilocybin researcher, and the archive is careful to say so. But the modern surge of wonder about the sacred mushroom is inseparable from the broader fungal renaissance he helped ignite — a public suddenly willing to see mushrooms not as garnish or hazard but as one of the planet’s oldest, weirdest intelligences. He is, in that sense, one of the great contemporary storytellers of the kingdom this whole site is built around.
Footnotes
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Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020). ↩
The record
Sources & editorial record
Sources & further reading
Merlin Sheldrake (2020). Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House / Bodley Head.
The award-winning bestseller that reintroduced a general audience to the strangeness and reach of fungi.
Editorial record
Corrections history
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