Eske Willerslev

Willerslev was born in Gentofte, north of Copenhagen, as the son of historian Richard Willerslev and Lona Loell Willerslev. He has a younger sister, Anne Willerslev, an ophthamologist, and an identical twin brother, Rane Willerslev, an anthropologist and director of the National Museum of Denmark. He attended Ordrup Gymnasium.

Before becoming a scientist Willerslev led several expeditions in Siberia in the early 1990s with his twin brother, collecting ethnographic materials and megafauna skeleton remains. These objects are stored at the Danish Moesgaard Museum, the largest Siberian ethnographical collection in Denmark. Willerslev also lived as a fur trapper in the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic from 1993 to 1994.

He obtained his Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Copenhagen University in 2004.

In 2003 Willerslev moved to the University of Oxford as an independent Wellcome Trust Fellow, a position he held until 2005. In 2004, at the age of 33, he became a full professor at University of Copenhagen, making him the youngest professor in Denmark at the time. In 2014 he became an adopted member of the Crow Tribe in Montana (Apsaalooke), where he carries the name ChiitdeeXia'ssee (Well Known Scout). In 2015 Willerslev took up the Prince Philip Professorship of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Cambridge.

Willerslev is a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and an honorary doctor at both University of Oslo and University of Tartu. He also holds the Order of the Dannebrog, an order of chivarly issued by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Miller Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Willerslev has received several awards including the Antiquity Prize for the best paper in the journal Antiquity in 2009, the Danish Independent Research Council's Major EliteForsk Prize, the Rosenkjær award for science communication, and the Genius Award (Geniusprisen) of Danish Science journalists for "an impressive array of research successes in the public eye, combined with a unique tour-de-force through university". In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Prize.

His father's education of Eske and his brother was rather authoritarian and included frequent physical challenges, such as obstacle paths and swimming in ice water, starting from the age of six. His father thought this would help them to become hardy later in life.

Willerslev's father was fiercely atheist. However, influenced by numerous experiences living with native people, Willerslev came to respect, and to some extent believe, in supernatural powers unknown to science. Such experiences included encounters with descendants of Sitting Bull and trapper tribes in Siberia:

"Something similar happened to me when I shot a bear in Siberia. The tradition there is that you pin the bear's head high up in a tree, overlooking where the bear had its hunting grounds. I refused and instead took the bear's head with me home as a trophy. Back home, everything started to go wrong for me and I suffered terrible nightmares. In Siberia the trappers had told me, if I didn't hang up the head as required, all the bears in the world would know about it and hate me for it. I then took a trip to our summer house in Sweden and pinned up the bear's head in a tree there and the nightmares stopped."

At the age of 32, he was baptized as Christian, although he declares himself as "religious, but not Christian".

Willerslev married Ulrikke Ji Mee Willerslev in 2007. They have two sons, Rasken Willerslev and Bror Willerslev. The family lives in Kongens Lyngby.