The Spirit Level

Kate Pickett is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, where she leads the Public Health & Society research group and is Director of the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change. She is an academic co-director of Health Equity North. She is also a Fellow of the RSA and of the UK Faculty of Public Health and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Her landmark book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (co-written with Richard Wilkinson) has sold more than 235,000 copies and was chosen by the Guardian as one of the 100 most influential books of the century and by the New Statesman as a top ten book of the decade. It reshaped the debate on fairness, health and wellbeing. Their follow-up, The Inner Level, confirmed Kate’s status as one of our most rigorous and compelling public thinkers. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Nature, New York Times and the World Economic Forum Agenda; she has delivered more than 500 keynote speeches, including at the United Nations, the European Parliament and within UK government departments. She is the co-founder and patron of The Equality Trust. In 2023, Kate received an OBE for services to societal equality.

Richard Wilkinson has played a formative role in international research and his work has been published in ten languages. He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School and Honorary Professor at University College London.