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The Whale

Overview

First published in 2008, Philip Hoare’s Leviathan, or the Whale is a work of literary nonfiction that brings natural history, cultural history, travel writing, art, and personal reflection together. It is not a conventional novel with a continuous fictional plot. Instead, Hoare follows his own encounters with whales and asks how people have imagined, studied, hunted, feared, and valued these immense marine animals. The book won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and became the work most closely associated with Hoare’s name.

A journey through whale worlds

The narrative moves through a series of encounters rather than following a simple chronological itinerary. Hoare recalls coming face to face with a whale off Massachusetts, visiting an aquarium at Coney Island and the specimen rooms of London’s Natural History Museum, and swimming in the deep waters of the Atlantic. These experiences open onto wider excursions into whale biology, whaling, maritime history, art, religion, myth, and literature. Photographs, woodcuts, and drawings accompany the text, making the book’s attention to images part of its inquiry into how whales have been represented and understood.

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a central point of departure. Hoare carries the novel into his search for the living animals that helped inspire it, considering the distance between actual whales and the immense, mythic creature created by human stories. His subject is therefore not simply the whale but the human response to the whale. Across history, whales have been treated as valuable resources, objects of scientific curiosity, terrifying monsters, and figures of legend. Hoare also considers the shift from killing whales on a vast scale, bringing many close to extinction, to protecting and watching them—and to treating living whales as valuable attractions for tourism.

Themes and significance

The book’s central themes include the power of myth, the limits of human knowledge, the consequences of exploitation, and the uneasy intimacy between people and the natural world. Hoare’s own fear is part of the account: encounters with whales do not dissolve their strangeness, but make the tension between wonder and apprehension more vivid. By setting scientific knowledge beside literature, images, and firsthand experience, he shows how cultural ideas shape what people think they see in an animal.

Hoare’s long-standing fascination with whales informs the book. He has recalled drawing them as a teenager, while his later reading of Moby-Dick helped direct his interest toward their place in human culture. The result is a reflective, digressive form of nonfiction rather than a textbook or a straightforward conservation argument. Its lasting importance lies in bringing natural history into sustained conversation with literature and art, while asking readers to reconsider humanity’s changing relationship with the sea’s largest animals. The book remains a defining example of Hoare’s ocean writing and a widely recognized modern work about whales.

About the Author

Philip Hoare

Life and education

Philip Hoare was born in Southampton, England, in 1958, with the name Patrick Moore. He later adopted the name Philip Hoare to avoid confusion with the astronomer Patrick Moore. He attended St Mary’s Independent School in Southampton on a scholarship and went on to St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Hoare has described an early and persistent imaginative life: at fourteen he was writing poems and stream-of-consciousness pieces and drawing whales, glam-rock performers, and figures associated with the 1920s. Years later, finding a notebook in his childhood home, he recognized in those teenage interests the beginnings of subjects that would recur throughout his career.

Hoare’s work crosses literary biography, cultural history, natural history, and travel writing. His interest in whales developed in part through reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a student. That encounter helped shape his continuing interest in how literature and culture make meaning from animals and the natural world. His books often begin with a person, creature, place, or artwork, then move outward through connected histories and personal observations rather than proceeding as narrowly chronological accounts.

Books and creative work

Hoare’s first major books established his interest in biography and cultural history. Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant appeared in 1990. He followed it with Noel Coward: A Biography in 1995 and Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War in 1997. Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000) turned to place and collective memory, while England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005) explored Victorian ideals and their historical setting.

His best-known book, Leviathan, or the Whale, was published in 2008. Combining whale natural history with art, literature, maritime culture, and the author’s own encounters, it won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. The award, now called the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, brought Hoare wide recognition. He continued his ocean writing with The Sea Inside (2013). In Albert and the Whale (2021), he approached the natural world and human perception through the work of the German artist Albrecht Dürer, extending his interest in the meeting of art, history, and nature.

Hoare has also worked in broadcasting, filmmaking, and curating. He wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick and directed three films for the BBC’s Whale Night. He was a co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Icons of Pop. These activities complement his books: across different media, he has explored the ways images, stories, and public culture shape how people understand subjects from artists to whales.

Reputation

Hoare is regarded as a distinctive British writer of nonfiction whose subjects range widely but whose method repeatedly connects individual lives and encounters to larger cultural histories. Leviathan, or the Whale remains his signature work and an important modern book about whales, valued for joining scientific curiosity to literary reflection and personal exploration. His wider reputation rests on this ability to move across biography, art, history, and the natural world without treating them as separate fields. The available biographical material records no death; Hoare is a living contemporary writer, filmmaker, and curator.

StoryFlow

Hoare’s Return to the Sea from "The Whale". This flow traces Philip Hoare’s passage from childhood fear of water toward an embodied, adult relationship with the sea.

Hoare’s Return to the Sea

This flow traces Philip Hoare’s passage from childhood fear of water toward an embodied, adult relationship with the sea.

The Whale as an Unfinished Mystery from "The Whale". This flow follows Hoare’s effort to understand whales while recognizing that observation, science, and art can never fully contain them.

The Whale as an Unfinished Mystery

This flow follows Hoare’s effort to understand whales while recognizing that observation, science, and art can never fully contain them.

The History of Whaling from "The Whale". This flow traces commercial whaling from local coastal hunts into a global industry and, finally, toward its decline.

The History of Whaling

This flow traces commercial whaling from local coastal hunts into a global industry and, finally, toward its decline.