Philip Hoare

Philip Hoare is one of the UK’s greatest writers of creative non-fiction and perhaps our most passionate advocate of marine ecology and culture, especially regarding the cetacaean (whales). His most recent book is The Sea Inside:

'The sea surrounds us. It gives us life, provides us with the air we breathe and the food we eat. It is where we came from, and it carries our commerce. It represents home and migration, ceaseless change and constant presence. It covers two-thirds of our planet. Yet caught up in our everyday lives, we seem to ignore it, and what it means'.

In The Sea Inside, Philip Hoare sets out to rediscover the sea, its islands, birds and beasts. Navigating between human and natural history, between science and myth, he asks what their stories mean for us now, in the twenty-first century, when the sea has never been so important to our present, as well as to our past and future.

Philip will be joined by artist filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland. Together they are making a new installation work about the whale for Utopia 2016 at Somerset House this summer.