Richard Dawkins's phenomenal bestseller The God Delusion has become an iconic book for our time. He was first catapulted to fame with The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of bestselling books: The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor's Tale and a collection of his shorter writings, A Devil's Chaplain.
Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award (1987), the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society (1990), the International Cosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Shakespeare Prize (2005), the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2006) and the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award (2007).He retired from his position as the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in 2008 and remains a fellow of New College.
In 2008 Channel 4 broadcast a three-part television series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, written and presented by Richard Dawkins, examining the legacy of the great scientist and some of the issues covered in Dawkins's latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth.
