Pranay Lal is a natural history writer, a public health expert and a climate change advocate. A biochemist, he works at a non-profit organisation on public health. Pranay has conceptualised and led campaigns and teams on local and global environmental issues, climate change, and planetary health. His writing focuses on the evolution of lifeforms and landscapes, and what events set them in motion. He has written two books on natural history – Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent, and Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses. Indica won the Tata Lit Fest Award (2017), and the Delhi Book Fair Award (2017). It was also listed among Mint’s 50 most significant books about India since Independence. Invisible Empire was named among GQ’s 20 best non-fiction books of 2021, and won multiple awards including the Green Lit Fest Award (2023).