The Wellcome Trust Book Prize

Twitter was abuzz this week with news of the longlist announcement for this year’s Wellcome Trust Book Prize. 

Now, I’m usually quite au fait with the various book prizes out there: the Man Booker, the Orange Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Costas – I try to keep an eye on them all, as regular readers of this blog will attest. The unveiling of the longlist for this particular prize, however, caught me somewhat off-guard - mainly because, before this week, I had never even heard of Wellcome Trust Prize.

Fearful that I no longer had my finger on the metaphorical pulse of the literary world, I set about investigating further.  I didn’t have to look very far - a quick Google search of ‘Wellcome Trust Book Prize’ directed me to the award’s official website, and, lo, the mystery was solved.

The Wellcome Prize, it turns out, is a relatively new award – established in 2009, it is now in its fourth year, a baby in comparison to those venerable institutions like the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature, both of which seem to have been around since the dawn of time.

The award’s raison d’etre is to acknowledge the year’s ‘finest fiction or non-fiction book centred around medicine’.  (This mission statement does not seem quite so left-field when one realises that the Wellcome Trust is a charity dedicated to the advancement of human and animal health through biomedical research and medicine.)  To that end, the winner, which will be chosen by a committee chaired by Radio 4’s Mark Lawson, will be awarded a generous £25,000 in prize-money.

 

 

In 2010, the award went to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by American author, Rebecca Skloot – a book which charts the extraordinary journey of a cell line taken from the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks, who died of the disease in 1951.  This cell line, known as HeLa, is still being used in cancer research today, over 60 years after the death of its progenitor.  Along with the Wellcome Prize, Skloot’s book also picked up the Heartland Prize for non-fiction and the Salon Prize – and, as of 26 August this year, it had spent 75 weeks in the New York Times Bestseller List.  No pressure for this year’s nominees then … 

The longlist for the 2012 prize are as follows:

• John Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, (Fourth Estate)
• Joshua Cody, [Sic], (Bloomsbury)
• Nick Coleman, The Train in the Night, (Jonathan Cape)
• Mohammed Hanif, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, (Jonathan Cape)
• Peter James, Perfect People, (Macmillan)
• Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects, (The Friday Project)
• Darian Leader, What is Madness?, (Hamish Hamilton)
• Ken Macleod, Intrusion, (Orbit)
• Professor Peter Piot, No Time to Lose, (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain, (Constable & Robinson)
• Tim Spector, Identically Different, (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson)
• Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of his Time, (Chatto & Windus)
• Thomas Wright, Circulation. (Chatto & Windus)
• Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule, (Transworld)

The shortlist will be unveiled on 11 October, with the prize-giving ceremony scheduled to take place in London on 7 November.

PS – Watch this space for a review of one of the long-listed titles, Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects, published by the Friday Project.

Update (17 Oct 2012): The shortlist, which was announced last week, is as follows:

• John Coates, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, (Fourth Estate)
• Joshua Cody, [Sic], (Bloomsbury)
• Nick Coleman, The Train in the Night, (Jonathan Cape)
• Mohammed Hanif, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, (Jonathan Cape)
• Peter James, Perfect People, (Macmillan)
• Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of his Time, (Chatto & Windus)
• Thomas Wright, Circulation. (Chatto & Windus)

Sadly, Harry Karlinsky did not make the cut.  For what it's what, my money is now on Rose Tremain.  Winner announced 7 November - watch this space.