Yuval Noah Harari to Be a Speaker of the 16th YES Annual Meeting

Yuval Noah Harari, Department of History Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; author of worlds’ bestsellers “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, will be a speaker at the 16th Yalta European Strategy (YES) Annual Meeting organized by the international forum YES in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

The 16th YES Annual Meeting will be held on September 12-14, 2019 in Kyiv.

YES is a leading forum for discussing Ukraine’s European future and global context. YES fosters new ideas. It connects Ukraine to international partners, supports forces for change in the country, and builds networks of supporters for a new Ukraine worldwide.

Over 400 leading politicians, diplomats, businessmen, civil activists and experts will take part in the conference. 

The conference will be moderated by Fareed Zakaria, host of Fareed Zakaria GPS, Stephen Sackur, host of HardTalk on BBC WorldNews, and Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Previously, YES meetings have brought together heads of state and government like Tony Blair, Kersti Kaljulaid, David Cameron, Bill Clinton, Dalia Grybauskaitė, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Bronisław Komorowski, Mario Monti, Shimon Peres and Donald Trump. Among the speakers were also heads of international organizations like Kofi Annan, José Manuel Barroso, Suma Chakrabarti, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Ronald Noble, James Wolfensohn, Lamberto Zannier and Robert Zoellick. Senior officials, such as Hillary Clinton, Valdis Dombrovskis, Robert Gates, Newt Gingrich, Will Hurd, John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Condoleezza Rice and Martin Schulz, have spoken at the meetings. Also, renowned thought leaders like Bono, Richard Branson, Vitalik Buterin, Jared Cohen, Niall Ferguson, Bill Ford, Richard Haass, Walter Isaacson, Elton John, Stephen Hawking, Ray Kurzweil, Arthur Laffer, Nouriel Roubini, David Rubenstein, Larry Summers and Jimmy Wales have been among the panelists. Presidents and Prime Ministers of Ukraine, as well as Ukraine’s political, business and civil society leaders, regularly speak at the meetings.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Prof. Harari originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

Yuval Noah Harari is a two-time winner of the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality, which he was awarded in 2009 and 2012. In 2011 he won the Society for Military History’s Moncado Award for outstanding articles on military history. In 2017 Homo Deus won Handelsblatt’s German Economic Book Award for the most thoughtful and influential economic book of the year. In 2018 Prof. Harari gave a keynote speech on the future of humanity on the Congress Hall stage of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.

Published in 2014, Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international hit. By 2018, ten million copies had been sold and the book was translated into nearly 50 languages. It was listed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for over six months in paperback, and was a New York Times top 10 bestseller. Sapiens was recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

In 2016 Prof. Harari returned with Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, a critically acclaimed book that examines the big future projects facing humanity in the 21st century. Within two years, five million copies of the book had been sold worldwide, and it was translated into nearly 50 languages.

After exploring deep into the past and then the future, Yuval Noah Harari published 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in 2018. Here he stopped to take the pulse of our current global climate, focusing on the biggest questions of the present moment: What is really happening right now? What are today’s greatest challenges and choices? What should we pay attention to?

Prof. Harari lectures around the world on the topics explored in his books and articles, and has written for publications such as the Guardian, Financial Times, The Times, Nature magazine and the Wall Street Journal. He also offers his knowledge and time to various organizations and audiences on a voluntary basis.