Creativity and compassion: winners of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open and Health Professional Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Joanne Key from England has been announced by judge Mark Doty as the winner of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine at an awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her winning poem was Colony which concerned the distress of her father during his final illness.

Also competing for the FPM Hippocrates Open Prize were Sarah Ann Leavesley from Droitwich in England who was awarded 2nd Prize for At breaking point, and jointly sharing the 3rd Prize Aniqah Choudhri from Didsbury in England for Repeat Prescriptions and Raphael Dagold from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan for Pharmacology.

Donald Singer, judge Mark Doty, FPM Health Professional winner Inez Garzaniti, judge Alisha Kaplan, Michael Hulse and Rafael Campo at the awards event in Chicago

Mark Doty announced Inez Garzaniti from Pontiac in the USA as the winner of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine for Cranial Nerve Shadowbox which was inspired by the functions and dysfunctions of cranial nerves.

Also in the running for the FPM Hippocrates Health Professional Prize were surgeon Stephen Harvey from Nashville in the USA who was awarded 2nd Prize for The Thirteenth Floor, and sharing the 3rd Prize Maria Ji from Onehunga in New Zealand for Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Patient and Emma Storr from Leeds in England for Six Week Check.

FPM Hippocrates Open Prize winner Joanne Key

The judges for the Open and Health Professional awards were Carol Rumens from Bangor in North Wales, Peter Goldsworthy from Adelaide in Australia and Mark Doty from New York City. They also agreed commendations for entrants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the USA – 19 in the Open category and 20 in the Health Professional Category.

Hippocrates Young Poet Prize winner Taylor Fang

Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA was announced by judge Alisha Kaplan as the winner of the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine at the awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her winning poem was Letter to Body Made Hollow and she was also shortlisted for On the Evolution of Cancer.

With an awards fund of £5500 the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem. The 2018 Hippocrates Prize is supported by medical charity the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.

Entries for the 2018 Hippocrates prize were received from 37 countries and from 5 continents.

Commended poets with judges and organisers in Chicago

Judge Carol Rumens said: “A good poem is like a blood transfusion. It replenishes the body of words, the language in which the poem is written. These prize-winning and commended poems sometimes highlight the metaphorical possibilities of a scientific vocabulary: one of the valuable aspects of the Hippocrates Prize is that it encourages such creative cross-fertilisation. But they also demonstrate that the borders stereotypically perceived between art and science cease to matter in the heat of imaginative and lived engagement.“ 

 

She added: “The health professionals write with empathy and a sense of mystery, the ‘open category’ writers summon descriptive precision.  Their forms are rarely traditional, but grow organically from the subject or the experience. So these poems celebrate language itself, while relocating bodily events to a less time-haunted region, and transforming some of the loneliest  aspects of human experience to the most vividly connective.“

Judge Mark Doty said: “Caring for the marvelous and fragile thing a human body is, those who work in the healing professions live in intimate relation with what it is to be alive. Every day they face our vulnerability, as well as their own.  That’s why so many have second lives as poets; writing can be a way to keep their own hearts open, giving form to feeling they must often hold at bay while they attend to what patients need.”

He added: ”The humane and moving work shortlisted for the Hippocrates Poetry Prizes testify to the power of poetry to help us to negotiate the difficult. In carefully crafted, artful language, they demonstrate how the wellspring of compassion renews itself In us again and again.”

Judge Peter Goldsworthy said: ”Sometimes pus, sometimes a poem…but always pain,’ the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, a near-perfect poetic distillation of the costs of creativity, at least ‘sometimes’    Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain – not even a fraction – leads to the partial consolations of art.  But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing,  poetry can  offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds – at least, again, ‘sometimes’.   As can humour;  and jokes are a species of poem, sharing its same search for precision, density, rhythm, timing – perfection.”

He added: ”There are many species of  poem  here – dark, poignant, epigrammatic  celebratory, funny – which caused me many headaches when judging their merits.  How to separate apples from oranges – and grapes, and melons, and durians?   In the end I can only applaud the  endless capacity of  the poets  – and the language –  for creativity, for compassion, for generosity, for courage under fire – and all their various subspecies of humour.”

See more on the shortlisted and commended poets on the Hippocrates Poetry website.

The winners were announced at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago from 4pm on Friday 11th May when the Hippocrates Awards Anthology was launched. There was also a reading at the Poetry Foundation by Mark Doty from 7pm on Thursday 10th May, an accompanying conference on poetry and medicine that morning and afternoon at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a workshop on poetry, medicine and art at Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday evening, 11th May.

The winning, shortlisted and commended poems in the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize have been published in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize Anthology which was launched at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on Friday 11th May.

Since it was launched in 2010, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 8000 entries from over 60 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and from Finland to Australasia.
___________________________________________________________________________
Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805  or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
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 relationship between medicine and poetry.

More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology.

The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.

The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:

• Center for Bioethics & 
Medical Humanities, Northwestern University 
Feinberg School of Medicine
• Harvard Medical School
• Hippocrates Initiative 
for Poetry & Medicine
• The Poetry Foundation

Stories of illness and love of life: the shortlist for the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Six young poets have been shortlisted and a further 5 young poets awarded honorable mentions in the £500 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine, one of the most valuable poetry awards in the world for young poets.

Competing for the £500 Young Poets award are Mia Nelson, from Denver, USA from love under the scalpel, Audrey Spensley, from Avon Lake, USA for 3 poems: Dissection, Requiem for a Surgery Scar and Variations on a Craniotomy, Catherine Wang from Hong Kong for Six pills and Amy Wolstenholme from Salisbury in England for words in the bone.

Honorable mentions have been awarded to Cara Nicholson from Oundle, England for An Unwanted Visitor, Alana McDermott from Oldham, England for Letters Upon The Sea, Ally Steinberg from New York City, USA for The Jacks, Norviewu Dzimegam from Orpington, England for I am and Naabil Khan from London, England for My Scars.

This year’s awards are being judged by poet Sian Hughes who will announce the winner at an Awards Ceremony in London on Friday 15th April.

Judge Siân Hughes said: “Reading a young writer's work is always a huge responsibility.  Misunderstanding someone, missing the point, is such an unkind, unfriendly thing to do, especially to the young, and no one is more exposed than when they open themselves to the page.

“These young writers take on stories of illness, fear and loss, staring into some of the hardest words in the language with honesty and courage.  What struck me about all of these mentioned, was that they showed a love of words as well as a love of life.

“Those who tackled the subject of mental illness - self-harm, eating disorders, hallucination - took on a challenge as brave as those who grappled with the technical language of cancer treatments.  I was moved by words about the agonies of acne and the madness of first love as well as by stories of hospital corridors and waiting rooms.”

The international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme by poets aged 14 to 18 years from anywhere in the world. The 2016 Prize attracted entries from Canada, England, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Scotland, South Africa, Taiwan and the USA.

More on the 2016 Hippocrates Young Poets shortlist and honorable mentions.

Register for the Awards Ceremony from 3.30 pm - 6.30 pm on Friday 15th April, at the Medical Society of London,11 Chandos Street, London W1G 9EB. 


Honorable mentions have been awarded to Cara Nicholson from Oundle, England for An Unwanted Visitor, Alana McDermott from Oldham, England for Letters Upon The Sea, Ally Steinberg from New York City, USA for The Jacks, Norviewu Dzimegam from Orpington, England for I am and Naabil Khan from London, England for My Scars.

Judge Siân Hughes said: “Reading a young writer's work is always a huge responsibility.  Misunderstanding someone, missing the point, is such an unkind, unfriendly thing to do, especially to the young, and no one is more exposed than when they open themselves to the page. 

“These young writers take on stories of illness, fear and loss, staring into some of the hardest words in the language with honesty and courage.  What struck me about all of these mentioned, was that they showed a love of words as well as a love of life. 

“Those who tackled the subject of mental illness - self-harm, eating disorders, hallucination - took on a challenge as brave as those who grappled with the technical language of cancer treatments.  I was moved by words about the agonies of acne and the madness of first love as well as by stories of hospital corridors and waiting rooms.”  



Previous winners:

-       2013 inaugural Hippocrates Young Poets Prize - Rosalind Jana from Hereford Sixth Form College in England, for Posterior Instrumented Fusion for Adolescent Scoliosis;

-       2014 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize Conor McKee, Sidney Sussex College Cambridge for I Will Not Cut for Stone;

-       2015 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize Parisa Thepmankorn from New Jersey, USA for Intraocular pressure

Notes for editors

For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07447 441666 or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

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 relationship between medicine and poetry.

2016 Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets judge Siân Hughes

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 Siân 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. Siân has been poet in residence in Youth and Community Centres, a Youth Theatre, a Health Centre, and a sandwich shop, and is and is currently poet in residence in a Birmingham school when she is not teaching part time for Oxford University. 

Hippocrates Prize founders

Professor Donald Singer is a clinical pharmacologist. 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 will published by Taylor & Francis in the Summer of 2015.

Michael Hulse is a poet and translator of German literature, and is Professor of creative writing and comparative literature at the University of Warwick. He is also editor of The Warwick Review. His latest collection of poetry, Half Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year by John Kinsella.

2016 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.

Fragility of the human form: short-list for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

The judges have just met in London to agree shortlisted and commended poems in the Open International and NHS categories of the 2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

Poets from New York and the UK are among finalists for this year’s Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Short-listed in the Open Category are Owen Lewis, child psychiatrist and poet from New York, and from the UK poets Anne Ryland from Berwick-on-Tweed and Jane McLaughlin from London.

Competing for the UK NHS 2016 Hippocrates first prize are paediatric cardiologist Denise Bundred from Camberley, former consultant haematologist Karen Patricia Schofield from Crewe and GP Chris Woods from Bury.
The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on Friday 15th April.

Chris Woods, Anne Ryland, Denise Bundred, Jane McLaughlin, Karen Schofield and Owen Lewis

Judge Rafael Campo said: "It has been tremendously heartening, in this age of seductive technologies, financial imperatives, and ever more culturally disparate illness experiences, to read so many stunning poems that remain so deeply concerned with healing in the broadest and most fundamental sense." 

He added: "Whether written from the perspective of care providers across many disciplines, or by patients and their loved ones, the poems submitted for the Hippocrates awards are an eloquent and powerful reminder of the the importance of the human imagination in confronting illness.  While medicine may sometimes cure disease, it is poetry, through empathy and a refusal to look away from human suffering, that always heals."

Judge Wendy French said: “Poems inspired by medical topics help us appreciate the humanity of medicine. Evidence for this was amply provided by the range of poems submitted for the 2016 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prizes, with topics drawing on personal experiences as patients, practitioners and observers.”

She added: “Despite their diversity, the quality of the best poems stood out, and the judges were in remarkable agreement about which should be commended or win awards.  It is to be hoped that this important initiative will continue for years to come.”

Judge Rev. Gareth Powell said: “The Hippocrates Prize has attracted a refreshingly vivid collection of poetry that links together human experience, medical precision and the fragility of the human form. In the poems, we glimpse, and are challenged by, something of the intimacy of medicine.  This is all thanks to the skill of the poets in observation and a discerning use of language.”

Now in its 7th year, the short-listed entries for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine have been selected from around 1000 entries from 40 countries by judges poet Wendy French, Harvard physician and poet Dr Rafael Campo, and Rev. Gareth Powell, Secretary of the Methodist Church.

With a prize fund of £5500 for winning poems in the Open International category and 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 7 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 7000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.

Find out more about the shortlisted poets.

The judges also agreed 16 commendations in the NHS category, and 17 commendations in the Open International category from Australia, France, England, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand and the USA.

Find out more about the commended poets.

More about the awards on the Hippocrates Poetry website.

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.

The International Hippocrates Prize is awarded in three categories:
- an Open category, which anyone in the world may enter;
- an NHS category, which is open to UK National Health Service employees, health students and those working in professional organisations involved in education and training of NHS students and staff;
- a Young Poets Award in the international Hippocrates Prize for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. Entries for this award are open to young poets from anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years.

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 Judges

Rafael Campo is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of eight highly acclaimed books and the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry; his third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his fourth, Landscape with Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002), won the Gold Medal from ForeWord for the best book of poetry published by an independent press. His work has also been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in numerous prominent periodicals including American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, Salon.com, Slate.com, Threepenny Review, Washington Post Book World, Yale Review, and elsewhere; he has also been featured on National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Arts website. He has lectured widely, with recent appearances at such venues as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, and the 92^nd Street Y in New York. His fifth book of poetry, The Enemy, was awarded the Sheila Motton Book Prize for the best collection of poetry published in 2007 by the New England Poetry Club, the nation’s oldest poetry organization. In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine; he has also won the 2013 Hippocrates Open International Prize, one of the highest value awards for a single poem in the world, for original verse that addresses a medical theme. His newest collection of poems, Alternative Medicine, was the subject of feature stories on PBS NewsHour and the CBC’s Sunday Edition radio show. See more information at www.rafaelcampo.com.
   
Wendy French won the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine prize for the NHS section in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. She has two chapbooks and two collections of poetry published, Splintering the Dark, Rockingham press 2005, and surely you know this (the title was taken from a Sappho fragment) Tall lighthouse press 2009. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS which was published 2013 by Hippocrates press. She has worked for the past twenty years with children and adults with mental health problems and was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School. She left this post to concentrate on working with people with aphasia/dysphasia helping them to recover their use of language through poetry. She was Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Centre UCLH from April 2014-2015.
 
Rev. Gareth Powell was appointed in September 2015 as Secretary of the Methodist Conference, one of the most senior positions of Church leadership in Methodism. He read theology at Westminster College, Oxford then undertook ministerial training at The Queen's College, Birmingham, obtaining an MA in Pastoral Theology before spending time at Graduate School at the University of Geneva. He as served in Coventry and Cardiff, where he was university chaplain. Since 2010 he has been a member of the Council of Cardiff University.

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 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.

Enter for the £500 Young Poets award in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

There is still time if you wish to take part or to let young poet friends know about the award, entries close at 12 midnight GMT on 29^th February, 2016.

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

The annual Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine is a £500 award for a single unpublished poem in English of up to 50 lines on a medical theme. 

The Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is open to anyone in the world aged 14 – 18 years.

2015 Hippocrates Prize winners: From the USA - Maya Catharine Popa (Open Award) and Parisa Thepmankorn (Young Poets Award) and Kate Compston from the UK (NHS Award)

Winning and commended poems in the Young Poets Prize are published in the annual Hippocrates Prize Anthology.

Shortlists for the Open, NHS and Young Poets awards in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine will be announced by the judges in early March.

Since it was founded in 2012, there has been interest in the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize from 15 countries, with winners and commended poets from the UK, USA and Canada.

The annual Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world with a prize fund of £500 for the Young Poets award and £5500 for winning poems in its Open International and  UK NHS Awards.

Awards will be presented in April 2016 at a ceremony in London. Winning and commended poems are published in the annual Hippocrates Prize Anthology. The awards have received widespread press and broadcast media coverage.

        Hippocrates Prize co-organiser Donald Singer said:
       "Engaging with health through poetry can provide valuable support for patients and their families."

        Poet and Hippocrates judge Wendy French said:
        "My experience as poet-in-residence at the MacMillan Cancer Centre shows how patients undergoing palliative care can find helpful support from engaging in poetry.”

Poet Wendy French, Harvard physician and poet Rafael Campo, and Gareth Powell, Secretary of the Methodist Church, are judges for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine international and UK NHS awards.
The Prize is run by the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine, which received the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts for its work on the synergy between medicine, the arts and health.

Pascale Petit wins Hippocrates international award for poem on alienation and mental illness

Poet Pascale Petit has been awarded the £1000 second prize in the Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine. The Award was announced on Friday May 22nd at an Awards Ceremony in London. 

Poets from New York and the UK were competing for this year’s Hippocrates Open Prize. 

Pascale Petit - photo by Kaido Vainomaa

Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in London. Her sixth collection Fauverie was shortlisted for the 2014 T S Eliot Prize and five poems from the book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. Her fifth collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo was shortlisted for both the T S Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year, and was a Book of the Year in the Observer. Pascale has had three collections chosen as Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, Independent and Observer. She was selected as a Next Generation Poet in 2004 and her books have been translated into many languages.

Pascale said: “I wrote In the Giraffe House last Christmas while I was on a writing retreat in Paris. I frequently visited the Zoo de Vincennes to research for my seventh collection in progress, Mama Amazonica, my attempt to love my mother through the beauty of animals. She suffered from severe mental illness and wasn’t well enough to bring me up so we had a difficult relationship.

That day at the zoo it was freezing and to warm up I went into the giraffe house. I’d only ever seen the giraffes outdoors, but there they were, all seventeen of them, viewed from above through a glass wall. One giraffe was obsessively licking the glass in front of me. I was mesmerised by her huge distorted head and the rest of her body plunging into the depths.

It was just like visiting a very sick person in hospital, that feeling of everything being alienated and behind glass, of health being far away as an African savannah. The giraffe reminded me of my last visit to my mother in hospital before she died, and what it was like to really look at her.”

 Maya Catherine Popa    Kate Compston    Parisa Thepmankorn

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, the £500 Third Prize going to teacher Catherine Ayres from Northumberland for Making Love to LINAC.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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 by 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).

Simon Rae is a poet, biographer, broadcaster, playwright and novelist. He presented Poetry Please! on Radio 4 for many years and wrote rude poems about politicians for the Guardian newspaper for even longer. In 1999 he won the National Poetry Competition after twice coming runner-up. His collection, Gift Horses, was published in 2006. More recently he has written three novels for younger readers, Unplayable, Keras and Medusa’s Butterfly, and his first detective story, Bodyline, comes out in spring 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.

2015 Hippocrates NHS £5000 Award for poetry and medicine to be announced in London on Friday 22nd May

The winner of the 2015 NHS Hippocrates Prize for poetry and Medicine will be announced at an Awards Ceremony in London at the close of an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine at the Medical Society of London on Friday May 22nd.

Competing for the UK NHS 2015 Hippocrates £5000 first prize are former counsellor Kate Compston, GP Ann Lilian Jay, tutor Carole Bromley and radiologist Rowena Warwick. 

The winners will be announced by judges Femi Oyebode and Rebecca Goss.

The judges also agreed 13 commendations in the NHS category.

At £5000 first prize in the NHS category, this is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. 

Register for the Awards Ceremony from 3.30 pm - 6.15 pm on Friday 22nd May, at the Medical Society of London,11 Chandos Street, London W1G 9EB. 

Now in its 5th year, the short-listed entries for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine have been selected from around 1000 entries, from 31 countries by judges poet Rebecca Goss, 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 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 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.”

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.



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 will be: 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 5^th 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.