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Very few writers in the twenty-first century are polymaths of the sort that previous centuries sometimes spawned – those who knew about all the subjects that mattered at the time, while still producing original work Specialisation and the multiplication of fields and subfields of research, in both the humanities and the sciences, has rendered such breadth nearly impossible Siri Hustvedt, however, is an exception: she is a polymath for our times, fluent in multiple specialised discourses, but whose mode is artistic   Hustvedt, who lives in Brooklyn, is primarily known for her seven novels Her first, The Blindfold (1992), about a poor graduate student negotiating the social-psychological maze of New York City in the late 1970s, established her as a novelist Her most recent, Memories of the Future (2019), returns to New York in the same era, this time with dual narration – an older self in 2017 reflects on the journal of her younger self What I Loved (2003) turns on the friendship between Leo Hertzberg, an art historian narrator, and an artist called Bill Wechsler In The Blazing World (2014), a neglected female artist enlists three male artists to show her work for her The book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Work of Fiction   Hustvedt’s novels are imbued with passionate philosophical concerns about the self, memory, identity and aesthetics While her roots are in literature, less widely known to her fiction readers is her exceptional grasp of the sciences – especially the life sciences, from neuroscience and psychology to genetics and embryology She has written groundbreaking essays on the embodied self, and the lasting influence of mind/body dualism on Western thinking, culture and social structures   Science is a remote territory for most non-practitioners, and it is unusual for people who aren’t trained to immerse themselves in specialised scientific literature The scientific world has long been her second home, and scientists have taken her in as one of their own Hustvedt and I first met through our mutual interest in philosophy and science, soon after her interdisciplinary, exploratory memoir The