E. O. Wilson: Why I wrote a novel – about ants

Why did you feel your novel, Anthill, had to be written?

This is the first time anyone has written about the lives of ants from their point of view. And I think this is the first novel set in the American South that pays close attention to the environment. I have made the environment, the treasured habitat that Raphael Semmes Cody fights to save, a character in the book.

You have said you wanted the book to lay out nature as it is. Why?

Over 90 per cent of novelists present nature simply in terms…