Young poet to receive new Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The winner of the inaugural Hippocrates Young Poets Prize of £500 is Rosalind Jana from

Winner Rosalind Jana

Hereford Sixth Form College in England, for her poem ‘Posterior Instrumented Fusion for Adolescent Scoliosis’.

The international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. Entrants were young poets from anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years. The 2013 Prize attracted entries from the UK, USA and Australia.

The winning entry was decided by judge and award-winning poet Clare Pollard, who published her first collection of poetry at the age of 19. 

Rosalind Jana is a sixth form student and part-time freelance journalist. She won the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers in 2011 at age sixteen and has subsequently written for Vogue several times. She regularly contributes to Lionheart Magazine, Oxfam and fashion initiative All Walks Beyond the Catwalk. She has a conditional offer to read English Literature at Oxford. 

About the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize she said: “I'm very pleased to be judging the first Hippocrates Prize for Schools - in bringing science and art together, I hope it will deepen students’ understanding of both, and uncover poets of the future.” She added that the top entries were “extraordinarily accomplished for writers of 18 or under”. 

Of Rosalind Jana’s winning poem she commented: “It is hard to believe that a poem with

Judge Clare Pollard

such an ugly name can be so beautiful, but it is an incredible display of control and craft, formally brilliant and full of striking visual imagery - the shuttered murk, the meaty spine, the cloak of skin, the ‘morphine black blown out by light’.  It is both passionate and eerily detached - a deeply impressive piece of work.”

Hippocrates Prize founders clinical professor Donald Singer and poet Michael Hulse said: “We are delighted that the Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is already having an international impact in inspiring a new generation of poets.”

The Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, the National Association of Writers in Education, and the Cardiovascular Research Trust.

The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for

Innovation and Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the synergy between medicine, the arts, and health.

To attend the Young Poets, NHS and Open Hippocrates Prize award ceremony in London on 18^th May at the Wellcome Collection and the related Symposium on Poetry and Medicine see http://hippocrates-poetry.org

Notes for editors
For more information about Hippocrates Prize winners and extracts of their winning poems, contact hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

About the winner
Rosalind Jana is a sixth form student and part-time freelance journalist. She won the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers in 2011 at age sixteen and has subsequently written for Vogue several times. She regularly contributes to Lionheart Magazine, Oxfam and fashion initiative All Walks Beyond the Catwalk. She has a conditional offer to read English Literature at Oxford. Further information can be found at clothescamerasandcoffee.blogspot.com

About her winning poem Rosalind said: 'At the age of fifteen I underwent an operation to fix my extraordinarily twisted spine. I had been diagnosed with scoliosis six months previously when my degree of curvature stood at 56 degrees. By the time I was offered surgery this had progressed to nearly 80 degrees. My backbone had compressed into the shape of a lopsided 'S', my right shoulder blade sticking out like a small wing and rib-cage barrelled to the left. I wheezed when I walked. Sharp aches and jabs of pain were expected. The surgical solution was to cut into my back, place titanium rods on either side of the vertebrae and screw them in place. This would manually straighten my spine and it would fuse solid over the next few months."

"Recovery was physically, emotionally and psychologically challenging. All that remains now is my scar. I am fascinated with its visual resonance, the way in which those complicated months full of agony and debilitation could have been reduced to a single, fading line of flesh. The poem was an attempt to express the strange disconnect between the skin I can see, and the muscle and bone lying beneath that my surgeon and his assistants worked with for five hours. I wanted to show how extraordinary a process it is and how intricate, messy and beautiful the body can be."

About judge Clare Pollard
Clare Pollard has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Changeling (Bloodaxe, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She published her first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, with Bloodaxe in 1998 aged 19. Her play The Weather premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and her documentary for radio, ‘My Male Muse’, was a Radio 4 Pick of the year.  She co-edited the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century and her new collection, Ovid’s Heroines, will be published by Bloodaxe this year.

More about the Hippocrates Initiative
The Hippocrates initiative was established in 2009 and already offers two successful annual poetry prizes, one open to submissions from anyone anywhere in the world, the other restricted to NHS employees (present and past) and UK health students. In each category a first prize of £5,000 is awarded. The Hippocrates Prize has attracted thousands of entries from 55 countries, from the Americas to Fiji, from Finland to Australasia, and prizewinners have come from New Zealand and the US as well as the UK.