Illness memoir wins Wellcome prize

LONDON, May 2, (Agencies): Visual artist Marion Coutts’s memoir “The Iceberg” about the time she spent nursing and caring for her writer husband Tom Lubbock as he slowly died of a brain tumour was named the winner last Wednesday of the Wellcome Book Prize 2015.

Coutts’s book was chosen from a shortlist of six finalists for the £30,000 ($46,300) cash award, the Londonbased Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity, said in a statement.

“Marion Coutts’s account of living with her husband’s illness and death is wise, moving and beautifully constructed,” writer and humourist Bill Bryson, the chair of judges, said.

“Reading it, you have the sense of something truly unique being brought into the world — it stays with you for a long time after.”

Coutts’s book describes the changes in the lives of her critic and historian husband, their young son and her own as they grappled with Lubbock’s diagnosis in 2008 that he had a grade four tumour that was seated in the area of the brain controlling speech and language.

Lubbock managed to write his own book, “Until Further Notice, I Am Alive”, which was published in 2012, after his death in January 2011. Coutts’s book describes the rituals of nursing and caring for Lubbock, the impact on her work as an artist, and her own reactions to living with a dying man.

“I have never cried like this. The fatigue of it is seismic,” she writes at one point.

Also: NEW YORK: Stephen King isn’t only a master of horror. He’s also a man of mystery.

King and Gillian Flynn were among the winners Wednesday night at the 69th annual Edgar Awards, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. King’s crime story “Mercedes” received the best novel prize at the ceremony in midtown King has been an Edgar “Grand Master” since 2007 and his novel “Joyland” was a finalist last year for paperback original.

Flynn, best known for her millionselling “Gone Girl,” won in the short story category for “What Do You Do?”