A welcome prize from the Wellcome Trust
The subject of medicine in literature is being celebrated for the first time in history with the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. We take a look at the shortlist.
By Kate Hodal
For Andrea Gillies, fantasy and reality were once two separate notions that the writer felt she had firmly locked down. But the line between the two was blurred the moment she decided to care for Nancy, her ageing mother-in-law of 25 years, who suffers from dementia.
"Dementia is a sinister and science fiction state of affairs that causes your memory, your identity and your sense of self to go," explains the Scotland-based journalist.
"My mother-in-law's 'reality' fluctuated between her childhood and late 20s, which meant that she wasn't married, had no children and still worked in an office.
"As her carer, I tried to convince her of things she could no longer believe - that the man in front of her was her son, that the man next to her was indeed her husband. In the end we had to live in her reality, which ultimately questioned our own sense of truth."
Gillies spent two years looking after Nancy and wrote in a daily journal about the experience to "keep myself sane".
That journal has now become a book called Keeper [Short Books, £11.99], which is one of six books shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a new award open to works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine.
The UK charity created the £25,000 annual award to unite the traditionally divergent fields of medicine and literature. And if this year's inaugural shortlist is anything to go by, it is an auspicious union.
Featuring both first-person accounts as well as gripping novels, the shortlist boasts themes ranging from Gillies's frank account of a journey into dementia; a philosophical approach to illness; and a tender novel about conjoined twins.
"We have been delighted with the response to the Wellcome Trust Book Prize in its first year and the array of themes and genres covered in the shortlist reflects this," says Clare Matterson, Director of Medicine, Society and History at the Wellcome Trust.
"Some of the world's great writers trained in medicine - like Chekhov, Keats and Smollett - and some medics have revealed great skill in writing. The book prize will hopefully make readers aware that many books they already read are infused with themes of health, illness and medicine more generally, and that these themes are rich with meaning.
"Writing that engages with medicine - be it fiction or non-fiction - can be especially powerful and we hope that this prize will bring new audiences to these books."
The judging panel is chaired by comedienne and former psychiatric nurse Jo Brand, and includes BBC science journalist Quentin Cooper, Welsh poet and non-fiction writer Gwyneth Lewis, physician and author Raymond Tallis, and Richard Barnett, expert in the history of modern medicine.
The winner of the prize will be announced at an awards reception at the Wellcome Collection in London on Wednesday November 4. But you can be your own judge by reading about the books - and discovering more about some of the authors - below.
For Gillies, just being shortlisted is a win in itself.
"Dementia is usually seen as a niche health matter, so it's thrilling to be considered alongside these other books," she beams.
"I feel like that's a prize already."
Cutting for Stone [Fiction, Random House, £17.99]
Ethiopian Abraham Verghese's debut novel transports the reader from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx.
Its characters of conjoined twins, doctors and patients follow the tale of a secret union between an Indian nun and British surgeon in Addis Ababa - and the upset, intrigue and betrayal that result.
Verghese is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, California, and the author of My Own Country, made into a film directed by Mira Nair, and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book.
Illness: The Cry of the Flesh? [Non-fiction, Acumen, £9.99]
Israeli-born Havi Carel is both a philosopher and one of only 120 women in the UK to suffer from the potentially life-threatening illness, Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare lung disease.
When Carel was told that her life-expectancy was only ten years, she decided to explore her illness through writing, and weaved in insights drawn from her work as a philosopher.
"When your future becomes uncertain, the ability to enjoy the present becomes more of a pressing need," explains the lecturer at the University of the West of England.
"That was something the Greek philosopher Epicurus said 2,000 years ago - and it's still valid."
Carel believes that the new prize demonstrates "a growing trend to bring the humanities and medicine together".
"This isn't an isolated prize," she says. "It shows we want to understand the complexity and variety of experience of ill people - and that there's a real need to talk about those experiences and share them."
Intuition [Fiction, Atlantic £12.99]
Allegra Goodman's Intuition is a novel about a high-profile couple running a cancer research lab in Boston and their response to a potential breakthrough. As colleagues begin to suspect that the 'breakthrough' is actually fraudulent, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it. The result is a novel as revealing about human nature as it is about the real life of science.
American Allegra Goodman has been named by the New Yorker as one of the 20 best American writers under 40 and has already won several awards. This is her first book to be published in the UK.
Three Letter Plague [Fiction, Random House, £8.99]
Award-winning South African journalist Jonny Steinberg's story focuses on HIV in the Cape. Following a shop-owner named Sizwe, the book uncovers the firmly held suspicions that prevent South Africans from getting tested - such as the belief that Aids is a plague started by demons.
"Writing about relationships between people and their illnesses opens up the world in surprising, unpredictable ways," explains Steinberg. "That there should be a prize for doing that is great."
Steinberg, who has already twice won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary award, chose to write a novel about the so-called 'plague' to humanize it, he says.
"In South Africa, people have become unbelievably numbed, as the epidemic appears to be unstoppable. It is killing about a thousand people a week and it isn't slowing down.
"All around the country, parents have lost children, children have lost parents, young adults have lost siblings and lovers. And yet we've developed this desiccated, abstract language with which to speak about Aids, as if it is happening a million miles away. That level of denial is quite extraordinary."
Tormented Hope [Non-fiction, Penguin Ireland £18.99]
Healthy or unhealthy, robust or failing, our bodies respond daily to our shifting state of mind. And Brian Dillon's book is about an especially dramatic instance of that relationship: the mind's invention of physical disease.
Through examining the lives of nine historical subjects - James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - Tormented Hope investigates the way the mind can make a prison of the body.
If Dillon's witty, entertaining and often moving book wins the Wellcome Trust prize, it will be his second award for non-fiction (having won the Irish Book Award for his memoir In The Dark Room).
- Post:
- del.icio.us
- Digg
- Netscape
- Newsvine
- Now Public
- Q&A
