Charles Foster

Catch Charles Foster on Do Radio: Where To Next? Dan Kieran 27th July - 2nd August 2026.

Charles Foster is a writer and Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford, whose work moves restlessly across law, philosophy, natural history, anthropology, archaeology, travel and theology in pursuit of two questions: who or what are we, and what on earth are we doing here. A qualified veterinary surgeon and barrister with a PhD in law and bioethics from Cambridge, he teaches Medical Law and Ethics at Oxford.

He is best known for his immersive, often physically extreme investigations into what it means to be an animal. Being a Beast, a New York Times bestseller longlisted for the Baillie Gifford and Wainwright Prizes, saw him eat, sleep and forage as a badger, an otter and a fox. Its sequel, Being a Human, traced 40,000 years of consciousness through the Upper Palaeolithic, the Neolithic and the Enlightenment. His latest book, The Edges of the World, argues that all innovation - evolutionary, religious, artistic - happens at the margins, never at the centre.

At the heart of Charles's work is a conviction that modern life has severed us from our bodies, our senses and our "constitutional" identity as hunter-gatherers and that wisdom is less a matter of acquiring information than of "unforgetting" the embodied, sensory knowledge we had as children.

In conversation with Dan, Charles explores gratitude, movement, sensory attention and the strange comfort of living on an edge, unpacking, along the way, why a scientist who knows everything about the colour red still knows nothing about redness until she has seen it for herself.