Tragic surgeon’s unfinished cancer memoir nominated for top award
A SURGEON’S unfinished memoir about the cancer that eventually killed him has been nominated for a top literary prize.
Paul Kalanithi is the first writer to receive a posthumous nomination for the £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize, which celebrates titles dealing with health and medicine.
Kalanithi, who studied at Cambridge, was on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died aged 37 in 2015, before he could finish When Breath Becomes Air, in which he describes how he continued to work and became a father for the first time while battling thehe illness. It was publisheded posthumously last yearar and became a bestseller.r.
The other books in thee running for the prizee include the story of howw Aids activists took on thee political and medic aall establishment, two bookss dealing with genetics andd Sarah Perry’s criticallyy acclaimed novel Thee
Essex Serpent, about thee conflict between science and religion in Victorian England. Other subjects covered include the story of a heart transplant in 24 hours and the Fifties polio epidemic in Australia.
Crime writer Val McDermid, who is chairing the judging panel, said the 12 books shared a commitment to “awakening our curiosity” and dealing truthfully with the world in the age of “post-truth”. She said: “The marvellous thing about this prize longlist is these are not alternative facts. These are proper facts and these are scientifically quantifiable truths.”
Previous winners include Andrew Solomon’s study of parenthood, Far From The Tree, and The Iceberg, artist Marion Coutts’s memoir of her husband’s illness and subsequent death. Kirty Topiwala,Topiw publisher at Wellcome CollectionC and Wellcome BookBo Prize manager, said: “TThis is an extremely strong longlist,lo characterised by the trademarktra eclecticism of the prizepr — each of these books grapplesgr uniquely and eloquentlyqu with complex, moving and profoundly human subjects.”sub
TheT winner will be revealed at tthe Wellcome Collection in EuEuston on April 24.