Richard Dawkins was, until his retirement in 2008, the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, where he remains a Fellow of New College. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
Dawkins catapulted to fame with The Selfish Gene in 1976. Since then he has become a prolific and award-winning writer, writing impassionately and purposefully about life which evolution has shaped indifferently and purposelessly, a life seemingly full of designs only deceptively so. Most of all Richard Dawkins masquerades his atheism as science, and especially in The God Delusion, using arguments, which are openly disdainful and often quite plain silly.
His other popular works include The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor's Tale, The Greatest Show on Earth, and a collection of shorter writings, A Devil's Chaplain.
His awards include the Royal Society of Literature Award (1987), the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society (1990), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Shakespeare Prize (2005), the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2006), the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year (2007), and the International Cosmos Prize of Japan.