Jenny Kleeman

 Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and broadcaster. She writes for the Guardian, The Sunday Times, Tortoise and The New Statesman. She has presented programmes for the BBC, Channel 4 and VICE News Tonight on HBO, as well as making thirteen films from across the globe for Channel 4's Unreported World. The Price of Life is her second book and will be published by Picador in 2024.

Current publication:

THE PRICE OF LIFE: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides (Picador: 14th March 2024) 

'Jon Ronson meets Louis Theroux in the style of Joan Didion' - Telegraph

'Jaw-droppingly illuminating' - inews

* £180,000 for each individual life saved during the Covid pandemic
* $2-3,000 to save the life of a child in Africa
* £15,000 to hire a hitman
* $500 for an Afghan bride

We say that life is priceless. Yet the cost of saving a life, creating a life or compensating for a life taken is routinely calculated and put into practice. In a world in love with data, it is possible to run a cost-benefit analysis on anything – including life itself. For philanthropists, judges, criminals, healthcare providers and government ministers, it’s just part of the job. In The Price of Life, journalist, broadcaster and documentary-maker Jenny Kleeman takes us on an adventure to meet some of the people who decide who gets to live, and who doesn’t.

In a series of extraordinary encounters – with people who have faked their own death or lost a loved one to terrorism, with hitmen and with modern day slaves – she discovers more questions than answers. What does it mean for our humanity when we crunch the numbers to decide who gets the expensive life-saving drugs, and who misses out? What do we learn about ourselves when philanthropic giving by the effective altruists in Silicon Valley is received by some, while others are left to suffer? Are some lives really worth more than others? And what happens when we take human emotions out of the equation? Does it make for a fairer decision-making process – or for moral bankruptcy?

Exploring the final frontier in monetization, Kleeman asks what we lose and what we gain by leaving the judgments that really matter up to cold, hard logic.

Previous publication: 

SEX ROBOTS AND VEGAN MEAT - Picador (UK) and Pegasus (US) - 9th July 2020 

A timely investigation into the forces that are driving innovation in the four core areas of human experience: birth, food, sex and death

We are on the brink of seismic change in every one of these four areas, from artificial wombs, to lab-grown meat; from sex robots programmable to have polite conversations with your wife, to a new frontier in assisted dying. Who are the people dictating and shaping the change taking place, and what is motivating them to do it? Can we safely assume that these entrepreneurs are in it for the thrill of human advancement, or might there be more sinister motivations at hand?

Praise;

‘Like Louis Theroux channelling Margaret Atwood’ – New Statesman

'The real treat is Kleeman's insatiable curiosity, pushing her to ask the difficult questions, even when conversations take an awkward turn' - The Herald, Scotland

The book is 'an epic exercise in concision - all four of these sprawling chapters could have run to books on their own, and at times I wish they had' - Eleanor Halls, Sunday Telegraph

'[Jenny Kleeman is] an engaging writer, and the book is often moving' - Tom Chivers, the Spectator

‘A fascinating book . . . It was so absolutely absorbing. I really, really loved this book.’ Janey Garvey, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4

‘A tour of the lurid fringes of the tech world’ – The Times 

'Midway through Jenny Kleeman’s entertaining survey of the latest advances in life sciences, I began to worry about female obsolescence too... She is an accomplished storyteller, capturing the silliness of these future salesmen... without losing sight of the dark implications of what they are selling' - New Statesman 

'A moreish page-turner of a book that will leave you feeling informed and ready for the next dinner party' - UnHerd

'Sex Robots and Vegan Meat is a tour of the lurid fringes of the tech world, which will appeal to fans of Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine. Kleeman is an acerbic guide, whose understated common sense contrasts with the grandiosity of her interviewees.'   - Times

"Thoughtful and diverting . . . Kleeman’s sceptical, humane instincts help her to unpack the possibilities of frontier tech . . . Even if it doesn’t have the answers, this elegantly written and eye-opening book poses the right questions" - Independent 

'A pleasingly sceptical investigation into the innovations that could change the way we eat, have sex and die' - Guardian

‘A fascinating examination of what the future holds, and of what it means to be human. Jenny Kleeman writes with wit and a wealth of knowledge that ensures you will never look at a chicken nugget in quite the same way again.’ - Elizabeth Day​

'The future is a fairly scary place, but there is no better guide to it than Jenny Kleeman.  By turns alarming, funny, thought-provoking and fascinating, this is a book that brilliantly shows us where much of our life (and death) is heading' - Stig Abell, Times Literary Supplement 

'An unforgettable journey into the near future by a fabulously gifted writer' - Will Storr

'A brilliant, thought-provoking book full of strange details, fascinating people and challenging ideas. A necessary book that wears its wealth of research lightly. As Jenny Kleeman says, this isn't science fiction, and yet some of the images will haunt me for years to come.' - Nell Frizzell, author of The Panic Years

‘I loved this book. A fascinating and often frightening dispatch from the near future, where we have sex with robots and grow babies in artificial wombs... and the craziest thing is that this isn't decades away, it's happening right now. Jenny Kleeman writes in such an engaging way - as well as posing big questions about what these developments mean to humanity, we get to know the quirks and obsessions of the individuals driving these huge changes. It's a very human book about the people who might change humanity forever.’ - Marianne Power, author of Help Me!