2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize

"The Wellcome Trust Book Prize celebrates the best of medicine in literature by awarding £25,000 each year for the finest fiction or non-fiction book centred around medicine."

"By establishing the Book Prize, the Wellcome Trust aims to stimulate interest, excitement and debate about medicine and literature, reaching audiences not normally engaged with medical science."

The longlist for this year's Wellcome Trust Book Prize was announced in London earlier today:

John Coates - The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust
Joshua Cody - Sic: A Memoir
Nick Coleman - The Train in the Night
Mohammed Hanif - Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
Peter James - Perfect People
Harry Karlinsky - The Evolution of Inanimate Objects
Darian Leader - What is Madness?
Ken Macleod - Intrusion
Peter Piot - No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses
Michael Shermer - The Believing Brain
Tim Spector - Identically Different
Rose Tremain - Merivel: A Man of His Time
Thomas Wright - Circulation: William Harvey, a Man in Motion
Paul Zak - The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity

This longlist, which consists of five novels and nine works of nonfiction, comes as quite a surprise to me, as there had not been a longlist in the previous three years of the award, only a shortlist of six books. The longlist will be announced on October 11, and the winner will be announced on November 7. More info:

http://www.wellcomebookprize.org/News/Announcements/WTVM056219.html

Since this is the only major book award about medicine I had planned to read the shortlist in its entirety before the award announcement. I'm pleased that I'll be able to get these books during my trip to London this month, but I'm not sure that I'll buy and read all 14 of the books by early November.

I do already own Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, and I had planned to buy Merivel and Circulation: William Harvey, a Man in Motion, the biography of the discoverer of the mammalian circulatory system, but the other books are unfamiliar to me.

That's an interesting list...Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is the only one I'd heard of before this, but several of the books haven't been published in the US yet, so I guess that's an excuse. :) I'll have to start with the books that are available on audio for now, since I've hit a traffic jam in my "physical" reading. I make too many promises, it seems! :D

I finished reading The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer. My review is on my 75ers thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/141995#3591489