Lucy Cooke
Best-Selling Author, Award-Winning Broadcaster, National Geographic Explorer, Zoologist
- Award-Winning Broadcaster & National Geographic Explorer: Zoologist and filmmaker with a Master’s from Oxford, who has made documentaries for BBC, National Geographic, and Animal Planet.
- Best-Selling Author & Gender Myth-Buster: Wrote Bitch and The Truth About Animals, both popular science books that challenge ideas about animal behavior and evolution.
- Sloth Advocate & Viral Storyteller: Created the Sloth Appreciation Society and made sloths famous through a TED Talk, viral films, and a best-selling book.
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Lucy Cooke's 2025 Biography
Lucy Cooke: Challenging Nature’s Narratives
Lucy Cooke is an author, National Geographic explorer and award-winning broadcaster, with a Masters in zoology from New College Oxford, where she studied under Richard Dawkins. Lucy is the author of 4 books, the recent best-seller and feminist paradigm shaker, Bitch: What does it mean to be female?, New York Times best-seller A Little Book of Sloth and its follow up Life in the Sloth Lane: Slow Down and Smell the Hibiscus, and The Truth About Animals a Royal Society prize winner. She is also a columnist for BBC Wildlife Magazine, writing her popular Female of the Species column since 2021.
Using her vast knowledge and experience as a zoologist and naturalist, Lucy’s work focusses on what we can learn and understand from the unique biology and behaviour of animals and the animal kingdom, including lessons surrounding: female and male behavioural patterns, leadership and dominance, pack mentalities and sustainability.
A sought-after public speaker who is comfortable performing to a wide range of audiences from Harvard to Birmingham ICC to Glastonbury Music festival. She has also worked with a range of corporate clients including J. P Morgan, Gartner, Deloitte and Disney. Lucy was also invited to speak about sloths and sustainability at TED Women in 2018, and has spoken at numerous festivals including Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham Science and book festivals, Bath book festival, Edinburgh Science Festival, New Scientist Live, The Electric Picnic in Ireland, the G10 in Amsterdam and Heidelberg science festival..
As a broadcaster, Lucy has written, produced and presented high profile prime time documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic, PBS, Animal Planet and Discovery, as well as live programmes Springwatch and The Beach Live for BBC. A regular panellist on radio shows such as Sue Perkins Nature Table, Infinite Monkey Cage, Women’s Hour and The Museum of Curiosity. Lucy’s Power of… series has been released as an audiobook entitled The Evolutionary Edge on Audible.
Lucy’s paradigm-busting research has earned her a fellowship at Durham University. Bitch has also been placed on the syllabus of countless international universities, many of whom have invited Lucy to lecture including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Mount Holyoke, Chicago, Stockholm, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Newcastle and Durham.
Lucy Cooke's 2025 Talks & Topics
Wolves were the original animal hierarchy, with an alpha male on top. However, the “alpha” model of leadership was never real, it was based on a biased view of animal behaviour and discounts the teamwork that embodies wolf society.
In this inspirational talk, Lucy gives a tour of cutting-edge research into the animal kingdom and explains how and why the most successful animal societies don’t thrive on dominance. She also draws on parallels with some of world’s most successful, and unsuccessful leaders, and shares the essential leadership lessons (honed by 3.5 billion years of evolution) to help you lead well and build successful teams.
Sloths have a bad rap. Being named after a deadly sin has done nothing for their PR. But nature’s slow coaches have been around for over 60 million years, outliving flashier species like the sabre-toothed tiger. As the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society, Lucy takes inspiration from the Sloth, along with many of Nature’s other great survivors.
In this fascinating talk, Lucy shares the work and life lessons learned from the vast array of species in the animal kingdom, to help create a better, happier, and thriving workforce.
The octopus is a master of innovation, which is why they have been on the planet for over 330 million years. Ultimately, the key to success is not strength but adaptability, and in an era of rapid change — AI, economic shifts, climate crises— embracing flexibility, innovation, and collaboration is key.
In this talk, Lucy explores lessons from nature’s greatest survivors, from problem-solving urban raccoons to cooperative meerkats, as these pioneering toughies not only offer inspiration but also the perfect antidote to future-proofing success.
Lucy Cooke's Latest Books
Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution & the Female Animal
Women aren’t the only victims of misogyny. For centuries female animals have been marginalised and misunderstood by the scientific patriarchy. In BITCH Lucy Cooke introduces the animals and scientists who are reinventing the female of the species. This critically acclaimed best-seller will change how you think about sex, sexual identity and sexuality in all animals, including us. One of the Telegraph’s top 50 books of 2022, BITCH was adapted into the BBC Radio 4 series Political Animals and is now on the syllabus at UCL, Princeton and other major international universities.
“A dazzling, funny and elegantly angry demolition of our preconceptions about female behaviour and sex in the animal kingdom” The Observer
The Truth About Animals
This “sure-fire summer winner” (New York Times) is an uproarious tour of the basest instincts and biggest mysteries of the animal world. Lucy takes us on a worldwide journey to meet everyone from a Colombian hippo castrator to a Chinese panda porn peddler, all to lay bare the secret-and often hilarious-habits of the animal kingdom.
Published in the UK under the title The Unexpected Truth About Animals it was shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society Prize for Science 2018, has received rave reviews globally and is currently being translated into 18 languages.
“Endlessly fascinating” Bill Bryson
A Little Book of Sloth
Published in the UK as ‘The Power of Sloth’, this New York Times best-seller combines Lucy’s adorable sloth photos with the story of a sanctuary in Costa Rica that specialises in rescuing sloths.
This celebration of the world’s laziest animal, written for children (ages 5+) won the Keystone State Reading Book Award 2015.
A percentage of proceeds are donated to sloth conservation.
“Cooke writes with a firm sense of authority and a loving irreverence that lifts these pages far above most real-life animal books and should make the inevitable umpteenth readaloud easy to bear” Publishers Weekly
Life in the Sloth Lane: Slow Down and Smell the Hibiscus
Combining Lucy’s famous sloth photography with facts about the strange lives of the world’s slowest mammal and words of wisdom about slowing down, Life in the Sloth Lane is a mindfulness book like no other. Gorgeous images of sloths paired with inspiration on the joy of living slow from a medley of gurus from Thich Naht Hahn to Bob Marley and Paulo Coehlo.
“The bar on animal cuteness gift books has now been raised to the highest treetops. This is the book everyone needs – we could all be bettered by being a bit more like a sloth.” The Wandering Bookseller
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