Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli historian, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the most widely read popular history writers of the twenty-first century. Trained as a medievalist and military historian, he became known internationally through books that survey the whole of human history, speculate about the future of the species and examine the relationship between stories, technology and power. His work belongs to the tradition of Big History and has drawn both wide popular enthusiasm and sharp criticism from academics.

Born and raised in Haifa, to a secular Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, he began studying history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at seventeen, specialising in medieval and military history. He earned his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2002 with a comparative study of medieval soldiers. His early research focused on military campaigns, supply and war memoirs. In 2012 he was elected to the young members' forum of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind began as lectures for an undergraduate world history course. It first appeared in Hebrew in 2011 and reached a global audience after its English edition in 2014.

Sapiens traces the story of humankind from the emergence of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age to the political and technological revolutions of recent times. Its central claim is that the ability to believe in shared stories, such as myths, religions, nations or money, allowed large groups of strangers to cooperate. In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), he speculates about humanity's possible pursuits of happiness, immortality and godlike powers, and develops the idea of dataism, a worldview that treats data flows as the highest value. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) turns to more immediate concerns such as nationalism, education and technology.

His books have been criticised for scientific looseness, a speculative tone and the simplification of complex subjects. Even so, his influence on public debate about history, technology and the future is considerable, and his books are widely read both in universities and beyond them.