Yuval Noah Harari, the medieval war historian who turned the human story into a global bestseller

Yuval Noah Harari

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 24, 1976 Kiryat Ata
Occupation	Medievalist
Awards	Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality · Moncado Award, Society for Military History

On the last day of September, Penguin Random House announced that Yuval Noah Harari has a new book on the way. The Laws of History, due next autumn, promises six laws that explain why empires rise and fall, why some religions take hold and why some nations gain power while others fade. “While history touches every aspect of our lives, we still fail to understand the laws that govern it,” Harari said in the announcement. From most authors that would sound like overreach. From a medieval military historian whose books have sold more than fifty million copies, it sounds like the next step in a habit his readers know well: take the largest possible question and answer it in plain sentences.

He did not set out to write bestsellers. His early career was spent on knights, sieges and soldiers’ memoirs, and the book that changed his life began as a course of lectures for undergraduates at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he still teaches history. The students got a survey of the whole human story in one semester. Readers around the world later got the same survey, and an argument about it that has never quite stopped.

Harari was born on 24 February 1976 in Kiryat Ata, just outside Haifa, and grew up in Haifa in a secular Jewish family. He studied history at the Hebrew University from 1993, specialising in the Middle Ages and in military history, then wrote his doctorate at Jesus College, Oxford, under Steven J. Gunn, finishing in 2002. Oxford gave him two things that shaped everything after. In 2000 he took up Vipassana meditation, which he still practises for two hours a day, with a silent retreat of thirty days or more every year. And he read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which he later called “kind of an epiphany”, because “I realised that I could actually write such books.”

First came the specialist work. Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550 (2007) studied raids, kidnappings and assassinations in medieval warfare, and The Ultimate Experience (2008) looked at how soldiers came to describe combat as a kind of revelation. They earned him the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in 2009 and again in 2012, and the Society for Military History’s Moncado Award in 2011. Few readers outside the field ever opened them.

Then came the lectures in book form. Published in Hebrew in 2011, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind became a bestseller in Israel before Harari translated it into English himself, with two collaborators. The English edition appeared in 2014. Its central idea is simple and hard to forget: our species came to dominate the planet because it can cooperate in huge numbers around things that exist only in a shared imagination, such as gods, nations, money and companies. The book spent 182 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, 96 of them in a row, and has been translated into 65 languages. Bill Gates reviewed it, and it carried a lecturer from Jerusalem to the stage of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, published in Hebrew in 2015 and in English the following year, turned the same lens towards the future. Having largely tamed famine, plague and war, he argued, humanity would now chase immortality, happiness and godlike powers through biotechnology and computing. He gave the name “dataism” to the belief that everything is ultimately data processing, and dedicated the book to his meditation teacher, S. N. Goenka. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) came down to the present: work, truth, fake news, meaning, and what to teach children who will grow up in a world nobody can predict.

Since then the work has spread across formats and ages. Sapiens: A Graphic History, written with the Belgian comics writer David Vandermeulen and drawn by Daniel Casanave, retold the first book in three volumes between 2020 and 2024. Unstoppable Us, his series for children, reached its third volume in February 2026. Behind the expansion is Itzik Yahav, his husband and manager, whom he married in a civil ceremony in Toronto and with whom he founded the social impact company Sapienship in 2019.

Nexus, published on 10 September 2024, is his most direct book about the subject he now discusses more than any other: artificial intelligence. It traces information networks from the Stone Age to the present and argues that AI is the first technology that can make decisions and generate ideas on its own, an agent rather than a tool. He took that argument back to Davos in January 2026 and to Oxford in May, where he gave the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Linacre College under the title “AI bureaucrats, AI religions, and AI boyfriends”.

Not everyone is persuaded. Academic reviewers have been far tougher on him than general readers. The anthropologist Christopher Hallpike described Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind as “infotainment”. In 2022 the neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan wrote in Current Affairs that he “sacrifices science for sensationalism”, and the anatomist Alice Roberts has attacked the book’s account of human evolution. The criticism comes with the territory he chose. He writes as a generalist in an age of specialists, and a generalist is always exposed.

Away from the stage, he lives near Tel Aviv, is vegan, and keeps his distance from the digital habits he warns about, using a smartphone only for travel and emergencies. The Laws of History is scheduled for 21 September 2027. If it does what his best books have done, it will make the long view of history feel urgent again.

Tags: writers, Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, historians, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Jared Diamond

Yuval Noah Harari, the medieval war historian who turned the human story into a global bestseller

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