Laura Spinney

Laura Spinney (born August 1971) is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer whose 2017 book Pale Rider is an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University in 1993. 

Spinney has written for Nature, National Geographic, The Economist, New Scientist, and The Guardian. She is the author of two novels, The Doctor and The Quick, and a collection of oral history from a central European city entitled Rue Centrale.

In 2017 she published Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 flu pandemic, published by Jonathan Cape who acquired the global rights in an auction in 2015. Spinney indicates that the global pandemic was the biggest disaster of the 20th century, exceeding the death tolls of both World War I (17 million) and World War II (60 million dead). 

Its full scope has only been recognised in the 21st century as researchers have examined old records, determining that 1 in 3 people became ill and between 1 in 10 and 1 in 5 died. At the time illiteracy was common, germ theory relatively new, antibiotics had not been discovered, and long-distance communication was often limited.

The first clearly identified and documented case was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook who reported in sick at Camp Funston in Kansas on 4 March 1918. Three distinct waves of disease outbreak occurred worldwide: in spring 1918, in late summer and autumn, and from later winter 1918 to early 1919. Between the first and second waves, the virus mutated and became more deadly in humans. The death toll in countries like China and India was particularly poorly documented. Spinney vividly describes conditions from all over the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to Russia.

Spinney's English translation of Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel Derborence was published in 2018. In 2019 she spent two months as a journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.