Charles C. Mann

Biography

American science journalist and author, born in 1955, a long-serving contributing editor at Science, The Atlantic Monthly and Wired, and a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian and Fortune. He has been a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005) synthesised new evidence from archaeology, anthropology and demography to argue that the pre-Columbian Americas were not a pristine wilderness but a landscape shaped over millennia by Indigenous fire and cultivation; it won the 2006 National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011) followed the global exchange of species, disease and populations after Columbus, and he also wrote The Wizard and the Prophet. The Chinese edition of 1491, translated by Hu Yinan, was published by CITIC Press in 2014. He has received writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.