Children’s Book Author · Conservation Biologist

About Martin Jenkins

Martin Jenkins writes narrative nonfiction for children, mostly picture books built around a single animal or a single scientific story: great apes, tigers, chameleons, penguins, and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Before he wrote for children, he trained as a conservation biologist at the University of Cambridge and spent roughly a decade at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, work that took him everywhere from tracking the chameleon trade in Madagascar to investigating the timber trade in Kenya. Since 1990 he has worked freelance for conservation organizations including WWF and various United Nations environmental bodies, alongside his writing.

He came to children’s publishing almost by accident, brought in to advise on Walker Books’ “Animals at Risk” series, and stayed to write his own books. That grounding in real fieldwork shows up throughout his catalogue: the conservation science in a book like Can We Save the Tiger? or Ape isn’t simplified for effect, it’s the same science he spent years working with directly.

The Story of Life on Earth

Alongside his books, Martin’s YouTube series “The Story of Life on Earth” traces the same territory in video form, from the first spark of life billions of years ago through to the animals sharing the planet with us now. Each episode takes on one chapter of that story, the emergence of eyes, the rise of ocean predators, the deep-time chemistry that got life started at all, using the same instinct for a clear, well-told story that runs through his books. Browse the episodes and the full library of books using the menu above.