“Hawking: His Life and Work”—A Conversation with Graham Farmelo and Natalie Wolchover
Friday, November 20, 2026
5:00 p.m. | Wolfensohn Hall 

A brilliant theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking lived one of the most extraordinary lives of the past century. And yet none of this should have been possible. Diagnosed with ALS, a rare and fatal nervous system disease, at age twenty-one, he was given only a few years to live—and spent the next fifty-five showing what can be achieved despite near-hopeless odds.

Drawing on the previously unseen letters and diaries of Hawking’s parents, as well as exclusive interviews with Hawking’s family, friends, and closest colleagues, award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo reveals the complex man behind the theories and global celebrity—and the resilience, fortitude, and support that enabled him to defy his life-limiting diagnosis.

A former academic and lecturer on physics, Farmelo is a Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and has been a frequent IAS Director’s Visitor and Visitor in the School of Natural Sciences. At the Institute, he wrote his first biography, The Strangest Man, about the famous theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Described in The New York Times as “a gift”, it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2009, and was a finalist for the PEN prize for biography in 2010. In recent summers at the Institute, he researched and wrote Hawking. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Natalie Wolchover will interview Farmelo onstage. Wolchover is a current columnist for The New York Times and Quanta Magazine, where she long served as a reporter and editor.  She has spent time at IAS as a Director’s Visitor and ran the IAS Science Journalism Workshop.

This program will be followed by a reception and book signing in Rubenstein Commons. Labyrinth Books will be on-site to offer sale of Hawking: His Life and Work. 

Register below to attend this free event.