Literarily speaking

13 October 2008

Launched at the 2008 Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Wellcome Trust Book Prize is a new annual competition to recognise and reward the best in fiction and non-fiction writing centred on medicine.

The £25 000 prize will be awarded for high-quality literature that explores the human experience of health or illness, or else promotes interest in medicine. An independent panel of judges - chaired for this year by comedian Jo Brand - will decide on a shortlist of six books for the prize, from which the winning title will be chosen in 2009.

Among other events at the 2008 Cheltenham Literature Festival was ‘Writers and Remedies’. These five events explored the part played by medicine in the lives and works of writers from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Building on the success of the ‘Writing Medicine’ events at last year’s festival, ‘Bodies’ was a series of six events for the 2008 festival that were funded through a Wellcome Trust People Award. This series united medical experts and contemporary writers to examine how the two groups consider biomedical issues and how these issues are expressed on the page.