Chickasaw author Linda Hogan has long been one of my favorite writers on the spiritual lives of nonhuman animals (animals), how to improve our relationships with the natural world, and how the natural world extends into human consciousness. In her book The Radiant Lives of Animals, winner of the Inaugural 2022 National Book Foundation Science Literature Award, Linda continues on this journey and uses her own intense relationships with animals as examples we all can follow to heal our souls and reconnect with the spirit of the world.

Here's what she had to say about her very thoughtful, fascinating, and inspirational collection of essays. One theme that Linda nicely threads throughout her writing is how the emotional lives of animals can be used as a sort of "social glue" to help us connect with other animals and how we can rewild our hearts and souls by tapping into these relationships.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Radiant Lives of Animals?

Linda Hogan: I wrote this to offer readers my experience of living with wildlife and domestic animals in a private and forested country, but it begins with how we have changed our ethical perspectives from the individual to a more collective relationship with nonhuman others. We share the world with a multitude of intelligences, not only our own, and it is most attuned to the others.

I also opened the book into the realms of psychology and science that include the other lives as having rights and personhood of their own. Because of this, the many different intelligences come together into a whole. For example, in New Zealand, a river has been called a Person and has all the legal rights that come with that word. Therefore, mistreatment of the river is a

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