Tutor Carole Bromley has been awarded joint
third prize in the Hippocrates NHS Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her
poem On hearing
for the first time. The Award was
announced on Friday May 22nd at an Awards Ceremony in London.
Carole Bromley (Photo:
Michael J Oakes Photography) has two pamphlets and a
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Carole Bromley |
first collection with
Smith/Doorstop (A Guided Tour of the Ice House) and her second
collection, The Stonegate Devil, will be published by them in
October, 2015. Carole has won a number of first prizes including the Bridport
and this is the third time she has featured in the Hippocrates Prize
About her shortlisted poem,
Carole said: "On hearing for the first time was written after
watching very moving footage on the news of a woman hearing for the first time
in her life after receiving a cochlear implant.”
She said: "the poem Lovely young consultant
charms my husband was prompted by the visit, 13 years ago, of the very
attractive and talented psycho-geriatrician, who came to our home to give us
the news of my husband Malcolm’s diagnosis. Brain scans had indicated beyond
reasonable doubt that he had Dementia with Lewy Bodies. What stayed with me for
years afterwards was the tension I could see being played out within her,
between professional scientific excitement about something unusual, and her
humanity.
The NHS Second Prize of £1000 went to former GP Ann
Lilian Jay from West Wales for Night Visit, with the £500 Third Prize
shared with Radiologist Rowena
Warwick from Buckinghamshire for her poem Mrs
Noone on loneliness in the elderly.
About her poem A Technique for Operating on
the Past, Maya said: "There is something pleasantly elliptical about
the fact that a neuroscientist relies on the very instrument that is the
subject of his study. I had long wanted to write a poem about Gr.T. Popa, my
great-grandfather, after whom the Medical University in Iași, Romania, is
named.
He worked on neuro-morphology in the 1930s and 40s,
but his remarkable research was ultimately cut short in light of his
anti-fascist, and anti-communist affiliations. That he was forced into hiding
and died of a routine ailment while escaping the communists still seems a dark
irony. In a way, writing this poem felt like a letter to him, an
acknowledgement of that unfairness."
Poet Pascale Petit from France and now living in
London was awarded the £1000 Second Prize for In the Giraffe House, with
the £500 Third Prize going to teacher Catherine Ayres from Northumberland for Making
Love to LINAC.
Parisa Thepmankorn from Rockaway, New Jersey
received the £500 2015 Hippocrates Young Poet Prize for Intraocular
Pressure.
She said: "I wrote the poem Intraocular
Pressure after a visit to the optometrist revealed that my eyes' intraocular
pressures were on the higher side of "normal". Inspired by the idea
of certain diseases as time bombs, my poem is the result of both my personal
fears and my attempt to extrapolate the future implications and physical
effects of the condition if it worsened.”
The
other shortlisted young poets were Daniella Cugini from Warwick in England for the surgeon dissects his lover and US poets Alex Greenberg from New York City
for Dusting and Alexandra Spensley from Ohio for Geography of a Bone.
Now in its 6th year, the short-listed entries for
the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine were selected from around
1000 entries from 31 countries by judges poet Rebecca Goss, poet Simon Rae,
psychiatrist Professor Femi Oyebode and doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple.
The judges also agreed 13 commendations in the NHS
category and 18 commendations in the Open category, to poets from England,
Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the USA
and New Zealand.
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. At £5000 first prize both in the NHS category and the Open
category, and £500 for the Young Poets Prize, this is one of the highest value
poetry awards in the world for a single poem.
Judge Rebecca Goss said: “The subject of medicine
is sprawling and complex, but poetry is the perfect medium to explore it
closely and aid our understanding of human experience at its most raw. A
variety of voices make up the winning and commended entries in this year’s
Hippocrates Prize.
Experiences of both medic and patient are explored,
but so too, are the insights of the bystander. Included in this list are the
carers, the relatives, the friends, revealing the impact illness also has on
their lives."
Judge Theodore Dalrymple remarked: “Once again, the
Hippocrates Prize has stimulated poets and health workers around the word to
put their experiences of hope, despair, sadness, and compassion into poetic
form, with impressive success."
Judge Professor Femi Oyebode said “I feel very
privileged to be involved in the Hippocrates poetry prize. This experience has
been most humbling."
He added: “The wondrous thing is to imagine that
these are poems written by healthcare workers who, in their everyday work,
deploy their technical expertise with emotional commitment and compassion, all
over the world, in a variety of settings in order to care for people; and yet,
in-between times, having observed the most extraordinary human situations of
trauma, tragedy, hope, despair, death and suffering, find the words to
communicate these with sensitivity, with original and unique images, and
sometimes with humor.”
Judge Simon Rae said "Judging the entries for
the Young Poets Award has been both exciting and moving. The standard has
been high, with both winners and commended poets producing strong, unflinching
poems which will remain long in the memory."
Notes to editors
Photos of all finalists, along with biographies and
extracts of their poems are available on request. Contact 07447 441666 or
hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
Awards: In each category there are: 1st prize
£5,000, 2nd prize £1,000, 3rd prize of £500, and further commendations each of
£50. The 2015 Hippocrates Anthology of winning and commended poems will be
launched at an Awards Ceremony in London on Friday 22nd May.
The Hippocrates Prize judges
Rebecca Goss grew up in Suffolk. She returned to
live in the county in 2013, after living in Liverpool for twenty years. Her
first collection The Anatomy of Structures was published by Flambard Press in
2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House), was
shortlisted for The 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection and winner of the
Poetry Category in The 2013 East Anglian Book Awards. In 2014 she was selected
for The Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets.
Femi Oyebode is Professor of Psychiatry University
of Birmingham & Consultant Psychiatrist National Centre for Mental
Health Birmingham. His research interests include clinical psychopathology and
medical humanities. His publications include Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind:
textbook of descriptive psychopathology 5th edition (translated into Italian,
Portuguese and Estonian); Mindreadings: literature and psychiatry; &
Madness at the Theatre.
He is a poet and his published works include Naked
to your softness and other dreams; Forest of transformations; Master of the
leopard hunt; Indigo, camwood and mahogany red; & Femi Oyebode: Selected
poems (edited O. Okome). For a critical review of his poetry see Home and exile
in Femi Oyebode’s poetry (edited Obododimma Oha).
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name for Dr Anthony
Daniels, who has worked as a doctor in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gilbert Islands,
London and Birmingham, most recently as a psychiatrist and prison doctor. His
writing has appeared regularly in the press and in medical publications,
including the British Medical Journal, the Times, Telegraph, Observer and the
Spectator and he has published around 20 books, most recently Admirable
Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (2015).
Hippocrates Prize Organisers
Professor Donald Singer is President of the Fellowship
of Postgraduate Medicine. His interests include research on discovery of new
therapies, and public understanding of drugs, health and disease. He co-authors
Pocket Prescriber, the 8th edition of which is published by Taylor &
Francis in the summer of 2015.
Professor Michael Hulse is a poet and translator of
German literature, and teaches creative writing and comparative literature at
the University of Warwick. He is also editor of The Warwick Review. His latest
book of poems, Half-Life (2013), was named a Book of the Year by John Kinsella.
The 2015 Hippocrates Prize is supported by:
The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, a national
medical society founded in 1918 and publisher of the Postgraduate Medical
Journal and Health Policy and Technology, has supported the Hippocrates Prize
since its launch in 2009.
The Cardiovascular Research Trust, a charity
founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and
treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation.