Judges announced for 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Poet Rebecca Goss joins author, journalist and broadcaster John Humphreys, and psychiatrist Professor Femi Oyebode in the judging panel for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize.

The Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem. The  Hippocrates has a £5000 first prize both for its Open International and for its NHS Awards, and a £500 prize for the best poem in the Young Poets category. All awards are for a single unpublished poem on a medical theme. Entries for the 2015 Hippocrates Prize close at 12 midnight GMT 31st January, 2015.

Rebecca Goss was selected in 2014 by The Poetry Book Society's as a Next Generation Poet. 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.

She joins a list of distinguished previous poet-judges for the Hippocrates Prize: Dannie Abse, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Marilyn Hacker and Jo Shapcott.

John Humphrys is a distinguished journalist and presenter of radio and television who has won many national broadcasting awards. He has been a presenter on the award-winning Today programme on BBC Radio 4, since 1987. Since 2003 he has also been the host of the BBC2 television quiz Mastermind. From 1981 to 1987 he was the main presenter for Nine O’Clock News on BBC Television. Previous Hippocrates judges representing the public on the panel were broadcasters James Naughtie, Mark Lawson and Martha Kearney, Science Museums' Director of Communications Roger Highfield and Sarah Crown, Editor of Mumsnet.

Femi Oyebode is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham and Consultant Psychiatrist at the National Centre for Mental Health in Birmingham. His research interests include clinical psychopathology and medical humanities. He is also a published poet. Hippocrates judges previously representing health professionals were Sir Bruce Keogh, Professor Steve Field, Professor Rod Flower FRS, Dr Theodore Dalrymple and Sir Robert Francis QC. 
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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 one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem on a medical theme. It 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 category in the international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets  for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. Entries are open to young poets from anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years.

At the 2014 Awards Ceremony at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, the £5000 Hippocrates Open International first prize was awarded to UK-based poet Jane Draycott for her poem The Return. The NHS first prize was awarded to trainee paediatrician Dr Ellen Storm for her poem Out of Hospital Arrest, and the £500 Young Poet prize was awarded to Connor McKee, an English literature student at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge.

The judges of the 2014 Open and NHS prize categories were poet Philip Gross, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Philip Mumsnet editor Sarah Crown, and barrister Sir Robert Francis QC.

To find out more about the 2015 prize, or to enter, click here.

Notes to editors


For more on the Hippocrates Prize and the 2015 judges, contact 0759 0478078 or email  hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com



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 7th edition of which is published by Taylor & Francis in May 2014. 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 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.