Alice Roberts Reveals the Books That Shaped Her Life and Faith 2026

Alice Roberts, the renowned anatomist and broadcaster, has shared the books that shaped her life, from childhood favorites to the works that challenged her faith. In this exclusive interview, she reveals how Richard Dawkins' writings transformed her worldview.

Early Reading Memories

Roberts' earliest reading memories are from The Village with Three Corners series by Sheila K. McCullagh. She loved the colorful characters like Johnny Yellow Hat, often reading with her grandmother in a garden surrounded by bright begonias and busy lizzies. These simple stories sparked a lifelong love of reading.

Her favorite book growing up was Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad stories. She admired the friendship between Frog and Toad, where Toad would get into scrapes but Frog was always there—a constant, caring, and funny friend. Roberts later enjoyed reading these stories to her own children, and they still revisit them for their humor, heart, and simple humanism.

The Book That Changed Me as a Teenager

As a teenager, Roberts loved authors like Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and Rosemary Sutcliff. But the book that had a profound effect on her was Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. Passionate about biology, she found the gene's-eye view turned evolution upside down and made it suddenly make sense. She went on to voraciously read all of Stephen Jay Gould's essays on evolutionary biology, and these two authors inspired her deeply.

The Writer Who Changed My Mind

When Roberts picked up Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker, she was already beginning to doubt the Anglican faith she'd been brought up in. By the time she finished it, she knew she had left that faith behind. Biological diversity could be entirely explained through natural processes; there was no need for—and no evidence of—a divine creator. She became a humanist, though she didn't know the word for it then.

The Book That Made Me Want to Be a Writer

Roberts never set out to be a writer. She wrote her first book as a handout to accompany her television series Don't Die Young on BBC Two. As a university academic, she wanted something more for a general readership. She had written papers but nothing for the public, and she loved the process of making complex science accessible.

Comparison: The Selfish Gene vs. The Blind Watchmaker

Key Takeaways

• Alice Roberts' reading journey spans from childhood stories to scientific classics.
• Richard Dawkins' works were pivotal in her intellectual and spiritual development.
• Her transition from faith to humanism was driven by evidence-based reasoning.
• She became a writer to communicate science to a broader audience.

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