Anjana Khatwa

Anjana Khatwa (born 5 May 1975) is an English Earth scientist, science communicator, television presenter, and writer. She received the the 2021 R H Worth Award from the Geological Society of London.

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Quotes

From my perspective as an Earth Scientist and as a presenter on television I would love people to know and understand the amazing story of the rocks under our feet. The fact that without these rocks, the beds of chalk, limestone, clay or even volcanic rocks we would not have the landscape or countryside that we have today.
We wouldn’t have the grasslands, trees and wildlife without these rocks. Everything about the countryside is dependent on the rocks that sit underneath the soil, and I would love for people to know and make the connection that the nature they see all exists because of the rocks beneath.
The rocks also have an ancient story of earth hidden within them that require us to use our imagination, we have to go back hundreds of millions of years to work out why they are there and can even tell us about the future of climate change.
- as quoted by Nicola Minney in: Changing Perspectives In The Countryside: Dr Anjana Khatwa. The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) at the University of Reading (February 10th, 2022).

.. even at the age of eight I had a great love for science, and I knew that I wanted to be a scientist.
- How rocks connect communities | Dr Anjana Khatwa | TEDxWinchester (April 27, 2022). (quote at 0:57 of 18:18 in video)

This whole journey started with Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote such an amazing book to connect botany and ecology with traditional knowledge. I also very much looked at other nature writers. Robert Macfarlane’s book Underland was really interesting. He didn’t necessarily talk about the science of geology, but he did talk about what it felt like to be underground. There are moments in that book which terrify me because it makes me feel so claustrophobic. He makes you feel quite powerful emotions about being with him while he goes on that journey. Another book that really taught me how to structure the stories is by Lara Maiklem and it’s called Mudlarking. She’s this brilliant, interesting person who walks along the foreshore of the River Thames at low tide and each chapter is about the different categories of the things that she finds. And finally the last book which I thought was so powerful as a woman writer was Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. She really lives in the moment of observing nature and natural processes. And not just the living processes of nature—what I love about that book is how she observes the rocks, the mountain and the landscape. She feels it in her heart, in every fiber of her being. And through reading that I knew what I wanted to achieve.
- as quoted by Lorraine Boissoneault, Listening to and Learning From Rocks: An Interview With Anjana Khatwa. Hypertext Magazine (hypertextmag.com) (2025).

... The Whispers of Rock: Stories from the Earth ... is a love letter written with such passion that you can’t help but be moved. Khatwa has devoted much of her life to spreading the gospel of geology, and here she offers clinical, scientific substance to back up her extraordinary depth of feeling.
Throughout the book, she is methodical in her explanations of subjects such as how mountains, craters and slate are formed, while also weaving in fascinating details. We learn that the Taj Mahal in India, an iconic symbol of love, was constructed with ivory-white Makrana marble, the origins of which date back to when several primitive land masses collided nearly 2 billion years ago. A recipe incorporating those tectonic movements, cyanobacteria, photosynthesis and calcium carbonate led to the rock used in this extraordinary monument, a much more complex process than might be realised at first glance. ...
Khatwa’s love of rocks emerged as a child, when she walked over solidified lava flows in south-east Kenya. In her book, she takes us with her around the world and across aeons, all the way to her home of 20 years in Dorset, UK, where the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and its 185 million years of geological history are her neighbours.
- Dhruti Shah, (8 October 2025) "The Whispers of Rock is a personal journey through aeons of geology". New Scientist.