page_title: Lucy Hawking
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Lucy Hawking / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: United States President Barack Obama talks with Stephen Hawking in the Blue Room of the White House before a ceremony presenting him and 15 others the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 12 August 2009. The Medal of Freedom is America's highest civilian honor. To Stephen's right is his daughter Lucy Hawking.
context_page_description: Catherine Lucy Hawking is an English journalist, novelist, educator, and philanthropist. She is the daughter of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and writer Jane Wilde Hawking. She lives in London, and is best known as a children's novelist and science educator.
context_section_description: After university Hawking spent a bit of time working as a journalist. She wrote for New York magazine, the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times, the London Evening Standard, and The Guardian. She also worked as a radio journalist. 
  Hawking aspired to become an author. Her first two novels were Jaded (2004) and Run for Your Life (2005) (also published as The Accidental Marathon). A few years after these books she transitioned to children's literature, and in 2007 she published George's Secret Key to the Universe, an adventure story about a small boy called George who finds a way to slip through a computer generated portal and travel around the solar system. This book was written with her father, Stephen Hawking, and his former Ph.D. student, Christophe Galfard.  It has been translated into 38 languages and published in 43 countries. Five other books have been published in the series: George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt in 2009, George and the Big Bang in 2011, George and the Unbreakable Code in 2014, George and the Blue Moon in 2016 and George and the Ship of Time in 2018.
  In 2015, Hawking and British publisher Curved House Kids were awarded funding from the UK Space Agency to produce an education project as part of astronaut Tim Peake's education outreach. The result was Principia Space Diary, developed with Kristen Harrison at Curved House Kids with expert input from Professor Peter MacOwan at Queen Mary University of London.  It reached over 60,000 students in the UK and was nominated for a Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Excellence in Space Education by the British Interplanetary Society.
  All of Hawking's books and articles centre around the theme of teaching science and education to children. She took interest in this topic after witnessing one of her son's friends ask her father about black holes at a party. He responded by telling him he'd "turn into spaghetti," and the boy was delighted with that answer. This experience shaped her perspective on using methods of entertainment, such as children's literature and adventure films, to engage the new generation on "post-truth" politics and scientific understandings.
caption: Lucy and Stephen Hawking with U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009
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