Neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin is among six writers shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

The £25,000 (about $46,265) annual prize has been awarded since 1988, and celebrates outstanding popular science writing and authors. Previous winners of the prize include Stephen Hawking, Bill Bryson, and last year’s winners, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

Levitin, a bestselling and award-winning author, musician, and professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University, is among six authors shortlisted for this year’s prize. Levitin was shortlisted for his book, Music as Medicine, published in the U.K. in January by Cornerstone Press/Penguin. The Canadian edition, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin Random House Canada in August 2024.

The book is a follow-up to Levitin’s bestselling 2007 title This Is Your Brain on Music. 

The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Oct. 1. The five finalists will each receive £2,000 (about $3,700).

The finalists are:

• Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and our Future by Neil Shubin (Oneworld)
• Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power by Daniel Levitin (Cornerstone Press/Penguin)
• Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain (Canongate)
• The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin (Sceptre/Hachette)
• Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi (Allen Lane/Penguin)
• Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better by Tim Minshall (Faber & Faber)