Making Living Matter from the bottom up

There are many ways to study life, and one that is particularly appealing to physicists is regarding it as self-organised active soft matter that is away from equilibrium ``just the right way''. In this Colloquium, I will discuss this notion, and provide a number of examples of how we can begin to put together simple systems - from basic ingredients that we fully understand - that would exhibit the kind of active behaviour we find in living systems.