Genius Myth

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, based in London, who writes about politics and culture. Her first book, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Guardian, Telegraph and Financial Times book of the year. She is the writer and presenter of the BBC podcast series The New Gurus and Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat, and co-host of Radio 4’s Kafka vs Orwell and Strong Message Here. She won the 2024 Kukula Award for excellence in non-fiction book reviewing.

A brilliant, timely and compulsively readable book. With her characteristic combination of deep reporting and lightness of touch, Helen Lewis shows how the idea of genius has warped our understanding of human creativity – and why people of vast accomplishment in one domain can prove so destructively clueless in others.