Why did we, and no other human species, come to prevail over the planet? Have we become happier as history has unfolded? And why have men been historically preferred over women in social structures?

Yuval Noah Harari is the historian who achieved the staggering feat of compressing 70,000 years of human history into a single, bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It has been hailed as a ‘lucid, illuminating and brilliantly written single-volume history of our species’ and still rides high in the Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers. In it, Harari tackled some of the biggest questions concerning the rise of homo sapiens.

On September 23, Yuval Noah Harari will make an exclusive London appearance when he comes to the Intelligence Squared stage. He will explore the profoundly challenging insights into human evolution that he expounded in Sapiens. In particular, he will focus on the crucial role of myth and fiction in society. Money, human rights, the invention of the limited liability company: all of these, Harari will argue, are figments of our collective imagination, on which we critically depend to survive.

Yuval Noah Harari gained a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, and now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international bestseller and is being published in more than 30 languages worldwide. In 2012, he was awarded the annual Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines.