J. M. Ledgard
Born	1968 (age 55–56) Shetland Islands
Occupation(s)	Novelist, technologist, foreign and war correspondent
Notable work	Giraffe (novel), Submergence (novel)

J. M. Ledgard (born 1968) is a British born novelist and an expert in advanced technology, nature, and risk in emerging markets.^[1] He also works with conceptual artists.

Ledgard was born in the Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Scotland,^[2] in 1968.

After reporting on the Romanian revolution for The Scotsman as a student,^[1] he worked as a foreign political and war correspondent for two decades. He reported lead stories from 60 countries for The Economist, including stints in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa.^[2] His emphasis was on security, natural resources, and macroeconomics. He reported on several conflicts and is a founder member of The Frontline Club. He was a contributing writer to 1843, The Economist's sister magazine. He writes occasional long pieces for The Atlantic and other publications.^[3]

Ledgard is the author of two novels, Giraffe (2006)^[4][5] and Submergence (2013),^[6][7] which was made into a film in 2017 of the same name by Wim Wenders.^[8] His work has been compared to W.G. Sebald and John Le Carré.^[9] Submergence was a New York Times Book of the Year and a pick of the year by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, NPR, and New York.^[10] Giraffe is considered a cult novel in the animal rights movement.^[11] A book of essays, Terra Firma, concerned Africa and technology.^[12]

He was a fellow and director at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne since 2012,^[1] and has been involved in promoting super advanced technology in Africa.^[13] He works with leading artificial intelligence scientists and roboticists to improve outcomes in often very poor communities and for nature. He was an early proponent of drone technology.^[14][15] He invented the concept of blood delivery by drone, introducing the American startup Zipline into Rwanda.^[16] He advanced the idea of droneports across the tropics, realising together with the architect Lord Norman Foster^[17] a droneport prototype at the 2016 Venice Biennale. His cargo drone work has been taken up and scaled by the World Bank, the UN and commercial partners.^[18] He supports digital self-sovereignty and was involved in early mobile money.^[19] Since 2018, he has been focused on how artificial intelligence will perceive nature.^[20] He was a visiting professor in AI and Nature at the Czech Technical University.^[21] He is presently developing a prototype for interspecies money, by which rare non-human life forms may revalue themselves to improve their chance of survival.^[22] He is an early proponent of the interspecies, an attempt to better comprehend other species using new technologies.^[23] He is a fellow of the Linnean Society and was a visiting fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He collaborates with major artists on nature based projects, including on the deep ocean and digital futures with Olafur Eliasson,^[24] on the interspecies with Tomas Saraceno,^[25] and Federico Diaz^[26] on nature based projects.