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About Florence Williams
Florence Williams is a science journalist. Her latest book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, won the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She is also the author of The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, published in 2017, and Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, winner of the 2013 LA Times Book Prize. As a podcaster, she has written and narrated two Gracie-Award Winning audio programs, The Three-Day Effect, and Breasts Unbound, both Audible Originals. A fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature, a visiting scholar at George Washington University, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Williams’s work work focuses on the environment, health and science. She is a Yale alumna (Berkeley College, 1989), and founded the Yale Student Environmental Coalition.
The PEN judges wrote: “In the wake of divorce after a 25-year marriage, veteran science journalist Florence Williams undertook to study the physiology of her pain and the solutions for recovery from heartache. Her resulting book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, chronicles healing from emotional loss and offers important insights into the mechanics and impacts of romantic grief. The judges of this year’s PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award were impressed by Williams’ brave, funny, and relatable scientific inquiry into her own heartache. What a gift, and comfort, to learn through her book that the way to get over a broken heart is through beauty, purpose, agency, and awe—and that science is in our corner.” The book was also named a best book of the year by Apple Books, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair.