玛丽·罗区

玛莉·罗曲（英语：Mary Roach，1959年3月20日—）是一位美国科普作家和幽默作家，主要作品有《大口一吞，然后呢？——深入最禁忌的消化道之旅》（Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal，获2014年英国皇家学会科学图书奖提名）、《不过是具尸体：解剖、撞击、挨子弹》（Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers）、《打包去火星：NASA太空人疯狂实境秀》（Packing for Mars: the Curious Science of Life in the Void）等。

Mary Roach (born March 20, 1959) is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published eight New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021), and Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy (2025).

Early life, family and education

Mary Roach was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. She was raised in Etna, a village within the town of Hanover. Both her parents worked at Dartmouth College.

Roach attended Hanover High School and was a straight-A student. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in psychology.

Career

After college, Roach moved to San Francisco, California, and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. Her writing career began in the public affairs office of the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as wart surgery on elephants. On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday magazine, Image.

She has written essays and feature articles for such publications as Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, National Geographic, Outside Magazine, and Wired as well as columns for Salon.com In Health ("Stitches"), Reader's Digest ("My Planet"), and Sports Illustrated for Women ("The Slightly Wider World of Sports"), and Inc.com.

From 1996 to 2005, Roach was part of "the Grotto", a San Francisco-based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. It was in this community that Roach got the push she needed to break into book writing. While being interviewed by Alex C. Telander of BookBanter, Roach described how she got started on her first book:

A few of us every year [from the Grotto] would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. So someone made the prediction that, 'Mary will have a book contract.' I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract. This is what literally lit the fire under my butt.

Although Roach writes primarily about science, she never intended to make it her career. Roach stated in an interview with TheVerge.com, when asked what exactly got her hooked on writing about science, "To be honest, it turned out that science stories were always, consistently, the most interesting stories I was assigned to cover. I didn't plan it like this, and I don't have a formal background in science, or any education in science journalism."

Roach has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including The Daily Show,The Colbert Report, Coast to Coast AM, National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and C-SPAN2 Book TV's In Depth. Her 2009 TED talk "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm", made the organization's list of its most popular talks of all time.

Roach has reviewed books for The New York Times and was the guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 edition. She also serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board, as an ambassador for Mars One and an advisor for Orion magazine. She has been an Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium and has served on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Awards and recognition

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2003 Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick, and one of Entertainment Weekly's "Best Books of 2003." The book has been translated into at least 17 languages, including Hungarian (Hullamerev) and Lithuanian (Negyvėliai). Stiff was also selected for the Washington State University Common Reading Program in 2008–2009.