29th February deadline for the international Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine was launched on Thursday 17^th December at an event at the MacMillan Cancer Centre at University College Hospital in London.

The Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world. The Prize is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme.

There is a  £500 Young Poets International Award in the international Hippocrates Prize Entries for this award are open to young poets from anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years. 

There is also a £5000 first prize both for its Open International and for its NHS Awards [deadline 31st January].  
All awards are for a single unpublished poem on a medical theme. 

Entries for the 2016 Hippocrates Young Poets international prize for Poetry and Medicine close at 12 midnight GMT on the 29th February, 2016. 

Awards will be presented at a ceremony in April 2016 in London.
 
2016 Hippocrates Prize judge Wendy French recently completed a year as poet in residence, working with adult and young patients attending the MacMillan Cancer Centre.

Click here to find out more about how to enter for the 2016 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

Winning and commended poems are published in the annual Hippocrates Prize Anthology.
 
Click here to order an Anthology of previous winning poems in the Hippocrates Prize.

2016 Hippocrates Prize Launch at the MacMillan Cancer Centre

Poet Siân Hughes (see below) will select the winner of the Hippocrates Young Poet Award for poetry and medicine.

The Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine – 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.

Notes for editors
For more on the Hippocrates Prize and the 2016 judges, contact 07447 441666 or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

Hippocrates website: hippocrates-poetry.com

 

2016 Hippocrates Young Poets Judge

Siân Hughes' first collection "The Missing" (Salt, 2009) was long-listed for Guardian first book of the year, and won the Seamus Heaney prize for a first collection.  Her sequence of poems about her mother's breast cancer won second prize in the first Hippocrates awards, and she and her mother Eleanor Cooke continue to write a shared book about this illness as treatments continue today.   In 1998 she set up the Young National Poetry Competition when she was working for The Poetry Society and she continues to promote young writers and to work with the National Academy of Gifted and Talented Youth to support the teaching of creative writing. Sian has been poet in residence in Youth and Community Centres, a Youth Theatre, a Health Centre, and is currently poet in residence in a Birmingham school when she is not teaching part time for Oxford University, working in a café or looking after her family.

The UCH MacMillan Cancer Centre
Macmillan and the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) have combined their expertise to build the UK’s most advanced cancer facility. The UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre supports the growing number of Londoners living with cancer. Over 27,000 people in London are currently living with cancer, and the number is growing. The UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre is the first of its kind in the NHS. It redefines the way cancer patients are treated, using the best diagnostic and treatment techniques to improve survival rates.  At its heart is the Macmillan Support and Information Service. A team of skilled Macmillan health professionals and volunteers, from benefits advisors to counsellors and complementary therapists, bringing the highest quality medical, emotional, practical and financial support.

Hippocrates Prize Organisers
Professor Donald Singer is a clinical pharmacologist and President of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. His interests include research on discovery of new therapies, and public understanding of drugs, health and disease. 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 2016 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.
The Healthy Heart Charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust, founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation.