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Sunday 31 May 2015

The colour of cancer: poetry in pallliative care

Vikky Riley, Specialist Cancer Nurse and Wendy French, Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Cancer Centre, UCLH spoke on poetry in palliative care during the 6th International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine held in London on 22nd May 2015.  

View the talk by Wendy French and Vikky Riley

 


Vikky Riley spoke about her role in the Macmillan Cancer Centre which opened in 2013.
She discussed the idea behind a Macmillan Centre and talked about the medical side to the work and the different therapies that are open to patients and in some cases their carers. 

She also talked about the purpose of The Living Room at the Cancer Centre.

Wendy French spoke about her role at the Centre as a Poet in

The Macmillan Cancer Centre, UCLH
Residence and about the weekly group that is run there. She talked about the incidental work that goes on, in the lobby, in the lifts, and in the teenagers’ ward. Some of the patients’ work was read and their response to what the group meant for them discussed. There followed a debate as to whether this sort of work can enhance a person’s life emotionally or whether it is just a distraction from the routine work of living with cancer. 


Wendy French
Wendy French is currently Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Cancer Centre at University College Hospital, London. Wendy was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School for fifteen years and now works with people with aphasia/dysphasia, helping them to recover their use of language through poetry. She also facilitates writing in other healthcare settings. She has won prizes in international competitions, including first prize in the NHS category of the Hippocrates Prize in 2010 and second prize in 2011. She co-authored Born in the NHS with poet Jane Kirwan, published by the Hippocrates Press in 2013. More about Wendy French.

Stanley Kunitz said ‘Our job at any given stage of life, is to create a self we can bear to live and die with.’

The Symposium was held to mark the announcement of the winners of the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January 2016 for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize. 

See more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of

£5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.

Wendy French reading poetry from the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre

Wendy French reading poetry from the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre at the Poetry and Medicine Symposium held to mark the announcement of the 2015 Hippocrate Prize winners

Listen to the poetry reading by Wendy French


This reading was held at the Poetry and Medicine Symposium held to mark the announcement of the 2015 Hippocrates Prize winners. Wendy French is currently Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Cancer Centre at University College Hospital, London. 

Wendy was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School for fifteen years and now works with people with aphasia/dysphasia, helping them to recover their use of language through poetry. She also facilitates writing in other healthcare settings. 

She has won prizes in international competitions, including first prize in the NHS category of the Hippocrates Prize in 2010 and second prize in 2011. She co-authored Born in the NHS with poet Jane Kirwan, published by the Hippocrates Press in 2013. 

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award. The closing date
for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize is 31st January 2016.

Find out more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of £5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia. 


Reading at Hippocrates Awards by Karen McCarthy Woolf from 'An Aviary of Small Birds'

Karen McCarthy Woolf read from her first collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, at the Poetry and Medicine Symposium held to mark the announcement of the 2015 Hippocrate Prize winners

Listen to Karen McCarthy Woolf reading from 'An Aviary of Small Birds' 



She is the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Prize and an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral scholarship at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is researching new ways of writing about nature in the face of climate change. 


Her first collection An Aviary of Small Birds, a book of elegiac poems that commemorate a baby son who died in childbirth, is an exploration of grief and loss and testament to the power of poetry as a transformative art. A Poetry Book Society recommendation and Guardian/Observer Book of the Month (see Guardian/Observer review by Kate Kellaway) it is published by Oxford Carcanet.

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January 2016 for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize. 

See more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of
Karen McCarthy Woolf
£5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.

Reading by Ellen Storm from her collection - 'Rupture' - at the Hippocrates Awards

Ellen Storm read from her first collection - Rupture - at the Poetry and Medicine Symposium held to mark the announcement of the 2015 Hippocrate Prize winners

Listen to Ellen Storm's reading from Rupture.

 

Her collection Rupture is published by the Hippocrates Press and available to order online

Dr Ellen Storm won the 2014 Hippocrates NHS £5000 Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her poem Out of Hospital Arrest.  

Listen to Martha Kearney discussing the 2014 Hippocrates Awards with judge Robert Francis QC. The interview on the BBC's World at One included a reading of Ellen's winning poem. 

Dr Ellen Storm is a medical doctor training in Paediatrics and Child Health in the north-west of England.  She has a BSc in Biomedical Sciences and an MSc in Public Health. 

She is currently completing an MA in creative Writing at the University of Lancaster, and lives with her partner and four-year-old twin daughters in Liverpool. 

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January 2016 for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize. 

See more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

Ellen Storm
With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of £5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.

Friday 29 May 2015

Migraine in poetry in the Hippocrates Prize

Migraine was the theme of two poems commended in Hippocrates NHS Awards and Poetry and Medicine announced by the judges on Friday May 22nd at an Awards Ceremony in London.

Sue Wood was commended in the Hippocrates NHS awards for A Herbal for Migraine and Eira Murphy was commended in the international Hippocrates Young Posts category for Migraine.

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January.  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.

Sue Wood works with the museums and galleries services as a workshop leader and runs The Creative Doctor as a module on Leeds University's medical degree. A poem from her collection was short-listed for Forward Best Single Poem and included in the Forward Anthology 2009. 

Sue said: "I wrote A Herbal for Migraine as a result of being both a gardener and a migraine sufferer.  I had read somewhere that St Theresa had also been a sufferer but interpreted her visual disturbance as a vision of  the new Jerusalem and so embraced the symptoms rather than taking an ancient herbal cure."

Eira Murphy is a young poet from Liverpool. She has previously been commended in The Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. Regarding her poem Migraine, Eira is also a migraine sufferer and felt that poetry as a medium and said she was "best able to express the abstract hallucinations which form part of the way she views the world".  Eira was also commended for a poem inspired by examining a sketch of a womb by Leonardo Da Vinci which sparked her interest in the perception of the body and how the idea of birth changed throughout the years. 

Read more about all the winning poets in the Hippocrates Prize and listen to their readings.

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.”  

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 was launched at the 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.
2015 Hippocrates Prize support
The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, a national medical society founded in 1918 and publisher of the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology.
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.

9 US poets named in Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine


The £5000 First Prize in the Open Category in the Hippocrates Prize was awarded to Maya Catherine Popa from New York City for a poem inspired by her neuroscientist great grandfather.
Maya Popa was among 9 poets from the US named in the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and
Maya Catherine Popa
Medicine announced on Friday May 22nd at an Awards Ceremony in London at the close of an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine.
The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January.
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." 
Maya Popa is a teacher and writer living in New York City. She holds degrees from Oxford University, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, NYU, and Barnard College. Her poetry appears in Tin HouseKenyon ReviewPoetry London, and elsewhere. Her essays and criticism appear widely, including in Poets & Writers MagazinePN ReviewThe Rumpus, and The Huffington Post. Her first collection of poems, Severe Clear, was completed this year.
A further 4 US poets were commended in the Hippocrates Open Prize: Richard Brostoff from Belmont Massachusetts, Eleanor  Ellis from Portland, Oregon, Elisabeth  Murawski from Alexandria, Virginia and Nicole Rubin from Farmington, Connecticut.
Also featured from the US were 4 poets in the Hippocrates Young Poet Prize. Parisa Thepmankorn from Rockaway, New Jersey received the £500 2015 Hippocrates Young Poet Prize and Alex Greenberg from New York City and Alexandra Spensley from Ohio were shortlisted and Talin Tahajian from the Boston area, now studying in Cambridge, England, commended, as Young Poets. 
The Hippocrates £5000 UK NHS first prize went to former counsellor Kate Compston from Cornwall for a poem about revealing the diagnosis of dementia.
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.
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.” 
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 international category, and £500 for the Young Poets Prize, this is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem.
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 launched at the Awards Ceremony in London on Friday 22nd May.
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.
2015 Hippocrates Prize supporters
The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, a national medical society founded in 1918 and publisher of the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology.
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.

Tuesday 26 May 2015

New Jersey poet wins Hippocrates Young Poet Prize for poem on the eye

Parisa Thepmankorn
New Jersey poet Parisa Thepmankorn has been awarded the Hippocrates Young Poet Prize for Poetry and Medicine, announced by judge Simon Rae on Friday May 22nd at an Awards Ceremony in London.


Parisa Thepmankorn from Rockaway, New Jersey, received the £500 Hippocrates Young Poet Prize for Intraocular Pressure.


About her poem Intraocular Pressure she said: "I wrote the poem 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, US poets Alex Greenberg from New York City for Dusting and Alexandra Spensley from Ohio for Geography of a Bone.

See readings by all the winning Hippocrates Young Poets

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."

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award for a single unpublished poem on a medical theme. The annual closing date for entries is 31st January.

The £5000 First Prize in the Open Category was awarded to teacher and writer Maya Catherine Popa from New York City for a poem inspired by her neuroscientist great grandfather. 

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.  

The Hippocrates £5000 NHS first prize went to former counsellor Kate Compston from Cornwall for a poem about revealing the diagnosis of dementia. 

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 Second Prize of £1000 went to former GP Ann Lilian Jay from West Wales for Night Visit, with the £500 Third Prize shared between tutor Carole Bromley from York for On Hearing for the First Time and radiologist Rowena Warwick from Buckinghamshire for Mrs Noone.

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.”  

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.

Monday 25 May 2015

Major Hippocrates Award for poem on deafness and hearing


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
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.”
The Hippocrates £5000 NHS first prize went to former counsellor Kate Compston from Cornwall for a poem about revealing the diagnosis of dementia.
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.
The £5000 First Prize in the Open Category was awarded to teacher and writer Maya Catherine Popa from New York City for a poem inspired by her neuroscientist great grandfather.
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.