Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning science writer and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He has been a guest editor for the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India.

He is a freelance feature editor for PNAS Front Matter. He writes for regularly for New Scientist, Quanta, Scientific American, PNAS Front Matter and Nature, and has contributed to Nautilus, Matter, The Wall Street Journal, Discover and the UK’s Literary Review, among others.

His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by UK’s Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, was long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.  His most recent book, Through Two Doors at Once was named one of Smithsonian's Favorite Books of 2018 and one of Forbes's 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics. His latest book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, was published in July 2024.

Anil trained as an electronics and computer engineer at IIT-Madras (BTech) and the University of Washington, Seattle (MSEE), and worked as a distributed systems software engineer and architect before switching to writing. He studied science journalism at UC Santa Cruz. Of late, he has retrained in aspects of machine learning and deep neural networks, during his stay at MIT as a Knight Fellow and via eCornell, Cornell University’s online program. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT-Madras, for his contributions to science writing.