Melanie Challenger writes and broadcasts on what it means to be a living being in an age of ecological collapse, biotechnology, and AI.

Over the following decade, her work moved increasingly towards questions of embodiment, animality, and the nature of living beings. Her 2021 book, How to Be Animal: What It Means to Be Human, examined the difficulty humans have in accepting their animal nature and the ways in which awareness of vulnerability and death has shaped philosophy, religion, society, and technology.

Alongside this, she began to focus on bioethics and the history and philosophy of science. She has been a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities and a visiting fellow in the Philosophy Department of Durham University. In 2019, she joined the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, where she became Deputy Co-Chair and co-chair of its priority area on environment and health.

In 2023, she became Vice President of the RSPCA. She is also the co-founder of Animals in the Room, which designs and evaluates ways to represent the interests of animals in policy and governance. She was part of the team that drafted the first Declaration on Animal Dignity in 2024. She also edited Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Nonhuman Existence in 2023.

Her recent work brings these interests together in an enquiry into the origins of agency, intelligence, and interests. Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World (2026) considers how mind and consciousness emerge from more fundamental forms of biological agency, and what this might mean for how humans understand and value other forms of life.

In her research, Melanie is particularly interested in the distinction between living organisms and the abstractions, representations, and technologies humans create from them.

She continues to work in creative fields. She published The Tender Map, illustrated by Rose Ferraby, in 2016. Her new collection, Dialogues of the Body and the Soul, will appear in 2027. As a librettist, she adapted the Anne Frank diaries for a Grammy-nominated choral work by James Whitbourn. She has worked with British composers Mark Simpson and Tarik O’Regan, including the text for the oratorio The Immortal, which won the 2016 Sky Arts/South Bank Award for classical music, and the chamber opera Pleasure, which was co-commissioned by Royal Opera House, Opera North and Aldeburgh Music. 

Melanie has written for publications such as New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Nautilus, Emergence, and BBC Science Focus. She participates in documentaries and films, including for the BBC, Netflix, CBC, Arte, VPRO and ZDF, and has hosted the podcast series The Psychosphere. Since 2025, she has been a National Geographic Explorer.