Register for Updates on Cancer and Lifestyle on 29th September in London

Medical charity the FPM is organising a one-day meeting on Updates on Cancer on 29th September at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London. 

Register online

Abstract submission online

Consultant Oncologist Professor Robert Thomas will discuss the evidence on benefits of lifestyle and nutrition after cancer, at a one-day meeting on Updates on Cancer on 29th September at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London organised by the FPM.

He said: “With 1:3 getting cancer and 3 million people living with the consequences of this disease at any one time in the UK, and the cost of care increasing, the case for developing effective, self-help initiatives has never been stronger.”

His talk “summarises the international evidence, which shows that physical activity, nutrition and other lifestyle strategies can substantially reduce the risk of relapse and minimise numerous late effects ranging from fatigue, weight gain, anxiety, hot flushes, arthralgia.”

He added that his talk will “highlight the biological processes that take place in the body after a healthy lifestyle, which can have direct and indirect anti-cancer effects. By looking only at the scientific evidence, it breaks down the myths behind which foods to avoid and which to eat more of. It discusses the risks the benefits, of mineral and vitamin supplements and highlights the potential benefits of boosting the anti-cancer polyphenols in our diet. It summarises the results of the world’s largest double blind randomised study of a polyphenol rich food supplement Pomi-T, developed and tested with the help of the UK government’s National Cancer Research Network (NCRN).”

Professor Robert Thomas is a Consultant Oncologist at Bedford and Addenbrooke’s Hospitals, a Professor of applied biology and exercise science Coventry University, a senior clinical tutor at Cambridge University. He is editor of the lifestyle and cancer website (Cancernet.co.uk) and designed the 1^st UK approved qualification in cancer rehabilitation. He wrote the evidence review for the UK’s National Cancer Survivorship Initiative, chairs the Macmillan Cancer Support Exercise advisory committee and directs an dynamic research unit, which has designed numerous studies which been published across the world. For these, and other, efforts to improve the long term wellbeing of patients he was awarded the British Oncology Association Oncologist of the Year, the Hospital Doctor Magazine UK Doctor of the Year and the Royal College, Frank Ellis Medal.

Southampton researcher Dr Lisa Loughney will discuss the benefits of exercise for people undergoing cancer treatment. 

Neoadjuvant treatment is treatment given as a first step to shrink a tumor before the main treatment e.g. surgery or radiotherapy.

In her 2016 paper on this theme she noted that neoadjuvant cancer treatment decreases physical fitness and low levels of physical fitness are associated with poor surgical outcome. She added that exercise training can stimulate skeletal muscle adaptations, such as increased mitochondrial content and improved oxygen uptake capacity that may contribute to improving physical fitness. She has therefore evaluated the evidence in support of exercise training in people with cancer undergoing the “dual hit” of neoadjuvant cancer treatment and surgery.

Dr Loughney works in the National Institute of Health Research’s Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit at the University Hospital of Southampton’s  NHS Foundation Trust.

Wendy French will discuss her Poet-in-Residency year at the UCLH MacMillan Cancer Centre.

Working with patients, sharing in their hopes and fears, tracking the everyday endeavours of a vital medical hub, Wendy French found herself drawn into lives in which blood tests, diagnosis, chemotherapy and hope become as much part of the human experience as cappuccino and Vivaldi on the radio.

Her residency resulted in publication of ‘Thinks itself a Hawk’. In the collection, one life, that of Zipora, a Jewish woman whose origins lay in the darkest days of the twentieth century, is chosen for particular attention for its power to place everyday experience in large frames, but also for the brightness with which it reminds us that everyday life is unique and important.

Wendy French was Poet in Residence at the Macmillan Centre UCLH from April 2014-2015. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS, published in 2013. She won the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine prize for the NHS section in 2010 and was awarded the Hippocrates NHS second prize in 2011. She has two chapbooks and two further collections of poetry published, Splintering the Dark (2005), and surely you know this (2009). She previously worked twenty years with children and adults with mental health problems and was head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School. She has also worked with people with aphasia/dysphasia, helping them to recover their use of language through poetry.

This one day symposium will include further sessions on:

• risk factors for cancer
• evidence for effective strategies aimed at preventing cancer
• medical humanities to support patients undergoing treatment for cancer

3rd annual charity concert evening for children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent

The distinguished University of Warwick Chamber Choir are to perform Spiritual and Shakespeare Song Cycles and A Child of our Time on Wednesday 20th July, 2016 at the Packington Estate in North Warwickshire in support of the children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent.

Order tickets for concert and reception

Contact the organisers

This is the third in an annual series of charity musical evenings organised by the Worsted Weavers Guild of Coventry in support of this national charity, which supports children and their families in the Coventry and Warwickshire area.

The musical performance will be in the St James’ Church on the Packington Estate in
Warwickshire (~ 20 minutes north of Kenilworth).

The performance will be followed by a reception in the Pompeiian Room at Packington Hall, with wine/soft drinks and canapés. TIckets for the concert and the reception are £35 per person.

St James’ Church and Packington Hall are not normally open to the public. The neo-classical St James’ Church was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and has an organ designed by Handel for his librettist, who was a cousin of the Earl of Aylesbury of the time, owner of the church and the Packington Estate.


Programme
Leigh arr. Woods: Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue
Trad. arr. Erb: Shenandoah
Tallis: If Ye Love Me
Mantyjarvi: Shakespeare Songs
Morley: It Was A Lover And His Lass
Bennett: Weep O Mine Eyes
Passereau: Il est bel et bon
Bruckner: Locus Iste
Tippett: Spirituals from A Child of Our Time
Shearing arr. Carter: Lullaby of Birdland
Porter arr. Blackwell: Let’s Do It

Map of Packington Hall
The children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent is the UK’s leading cancer charity for children and young people, and their families. CLIC Sargent provides clinical, practical, financial and emotional support to help them cope with cancer and get the most out of life. CLIC Sargent aims to help the whole family deal with the impact of cancer and its treatment. CLIC Sargent is active nationally, and locally in the Warwickshire and Coventry area.

St James’ Church, Packington Estate

The University of Warwick Chamber Choir performs in Warwickshire and further afield, with annual tour destinations including Spain, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as regular performances in London. UWCC have appeared on BBC national television in the Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year competition, live television in Greece, and on Central Television with Caliche with whom a CD of Ariel Ramirez’ Latin American Misa Criolla and Navidad Nuestra was recorded (the British première recording). UWCC’s wide ranging repertoire spans sacred, secular and folk music. The UWCC have premiered works by Howard Skempton and Michael Nyman and have commissioned new works from Joe Cutler and Jonathan Dove for 2015/16.

The choir’s conductor Lucy Griffiths is the Assistant Director of Music at the University of Warwick. She studied for her undergraduate degree in Music at the University of Bristol, where she first discovered her passion for conducting. She went on to work as a lecturer in Music at Portsmouth University before being awarded the prestigious sinfonia ViVA conducting scholarship. This allowed her to complete her masters in conducting at Birmingham Conservatoire, where she was twice awarded the Sir Michael Beech conducting prize.

Charity concert evening on 20th July 2016 for children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent

St James' Church, Packington Estate

The distinguished University of Warwick Chamber Choir are to perform Spiritual and Shakespeare Song Cycles and A Child of our Time on Wednesday 20th July, 2016 at the Packington Estate in North Warwickshire in support of the children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent.

This is the third in an annual series of charity musical evenings organised by the Worsted Weavers Guild of Coventry in support of this national charity, which supports children and their families in the Coventry and Warwickshire area.

The musical performance will be in the St James’ Church on the Packington Estate in
Warwickshire (~ 20 minutes north of Kenilworth). 

St James’ Church and Packington Hall are not normally open to the public. The event is being held on the Estate by kind permission of the Earl of Aylesbury.

The neo-classical St James’ Church was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and has an organ designed by Handel for his librettist, who was a cousin of the Earl of Aylesbury of the time, owner of the church and the Packington Estate.

Order tickets for concert and reception

The performance will be followed by a reception in the Pompeiian Hall at Packington   with wine/soft drinks and canapés. TIckets for the concert and the reception are £35 per person.

Map of Packington Hall

The children’s cancer charity  CLIC Sargent is the UK’s leading cancer charity for children and young people, and their families. CLIC Sargent provides clinical, practical, financial and emotional support to help them cope with cancer and get the most out of life. CLIC Sargent aims to help the whole family deal with the impact of cancer and its treatment. CLIC Sargent is active nationally, and locally in the Warwickshire and Coventry area.

University of Warwick Chamber Choir performs in Warwickshire and further afield, with annual tour destinations including Spain, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as regular performances in London and concerts on our own. UWCC have appeared on BBC national television ...

Read more about the event

2016 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine launch at UCH MacMillan Cancer Centre in London

The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine was launched at the MacMillan Cancer Centre at University College Hospital in London.

Entries for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize International and NHS awards close at

Deadline: End of the day on 1^st February 2016 

If you wish to take part or to let poet friends know about the awards there is still just time: entries for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize International and NHS awards close at the end of the day (midnight in your local time zone) on 1^st February 2016. The deadline has been extended for 24 hours in view of technical difficulties with online submission on some platforms. 
 
Entries for the 2016 Hippocrates Young Poets international prize for Poetry and Medicine close at 12 midnight GMT on the 29th February, 2016.  
 
There have already been entries for the 2016 awards from 37 countries and territories from throughout the UK and overseas, from Australia to Zambia.

The Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world with a £5000 first prize both for its Open International and for its NHS Awards.  

There is also a £500 prize for the best poem on a medical theme in the Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets.

All awards are for a single unpublished poem on a medical theme. 

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 or to enter for the 2016 Hippocrates 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 Wendy French, Harvard physician and poet Rafael Campo, and Gareth Powell, Secretary of the Methodist Church, will judge the 2016 Hippocrates Prize for poetry and medicine international and UK NHS awards. The judges are joined by poet Siân Hughes, who will select the winner of the Hippocrates Young Poet Award for poetry and medicine

Hippocrates Prize organiser and Clinical Pharmacologist Donald Singer said: "Providing psychological support is an important aspect of the new NHS guidelines for end-of-life care. Engaging with health through poetry can provide valuable support for patients and their families."

He added “We are delighted to have such a distinguished panel of judges for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize, which has since its launch attracted interest from over 60 countries."

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. We are very grateful that the MacMillan Cancer Centre has agreed to host the launch of the 2016 Hippocrates.”

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.

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.
 

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 Hippocrates initiative has been supported by many organisations. These include 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; the Wellcome Trust, the National Association of Writers in Education, the University of Warwick, and many other health professional, literary and cultural organisations.

Coull Quartet evening raises funds for children's cancer charity CLIC Sargent

The Coull Quartet performed classical works by Haydn and Debussy on 15th September 2015 in support of CLIC Sargent. The musical evening was organised by the Worsted Weavers Guild of Coventry, its second in a series of annual charitable music events. 

The Coull Quartet, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary, has performed worldwide, including in China, Brazil, Germany and Poland.

CLIC Sargent Fundraising Manager Lydia Buckmaster said: “The Worsted Weavers Guild put together a wonderful evening and the Coull Quartet played beautifully.

"Everyone in attendance was generous, helping the event to raise a fantastic £1,578 to support children and young people with cancer.”

Outstanding musical evening

Concert organiser Donald Singer said: “The Worsted Weavers Guild of Coventry decided to support CLIC Sargent because of its excellent  clinical and practical work, work, both nationally and locally, to help the whole family deal with the impact of cancer and its treatment on children and young people.

“Our guest musicians – the Coull Quartet – provided an outstanding musical evening in the beautiful historic setting of Packington Hall, which was made available through the generosity of the Earl of Aylesford.

“We are very grateful to all those who supported the charity concert, by coming to the event or through donations to CLIC Sargent, having heard about its excellent work through our activities.

“We look forward to our third charity concert, to be held in the summer of 2016, once again in support of CLIC Sargent.”

Find out more

To find out you or your company could help support CLIC Sargent, please contact CLIC Sargent Fundraising Manager Lydia Buckmaster on 01509 673 881 or email lydia.buckmaster@clicsargent.org.uk

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.

Teacher wins a major award in the Hippocrates Prize for a poem on experience of cancer treatment

Teacher Catherine Ayres has been awarded the £500 third prize in the Open International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine for her poem Nght Visit. 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 for Poetry and Medicine. 

 

Catherine Ayres is a teacher who lives in Northumberland.  Her poems have appeared in print and online magazines, including Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Moth. 

About Making love to LINAC she said: "I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012. This poem is about my experience of radiotherapy. It was written in response to a prompt set by Jo Bell in her online poetry group '52'. Writing about the treatments I underwent has helped me to accept what happened and move forward into life after major illness.”

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.

 Maya Catherine Popa      Kate Compston   Parisa Thepmankorn

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 £1000Second Prize for In the Giraffe House.

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 toformer 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 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.

90 years for the Postgraduate Medical Journal

A Symposium is being organised by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine to mark the 90th Anniversary of its first official journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. The Symposium will be held at the Medical Society of London on on 1st October 2015.
Speakers on the day will comment on what medicine was like in the 1920s, current progress in their field, and what is in prospect over the next 90 years.
Other speakers will include FPM Fellow Professor Peter Barnes FRS, London, who will speak on advances in respiratory medicine, Professor Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and Past-President of the Royal College of Physicians who will discuss opportunities to improve public health through a focus on health in the workplace, Professor Melanie Davies (Leicester) on progress in managing diabetes, vascular surgeon Professor Alison Halliday (Oxford) on carotid surgery to prevent stroke, FPM Fellow chemical biologist Andrew Marsh (Warwick) who will discuss advances in drug discovery, FPM Fellow cardiac surgeon Wade Dimitri (Coventry) who will discuss early development of heart surgery  Dr Paul Nunn (London), former Director of the WHO Tuberculosis Programme, on advances in managing tuberculosis, FPM Fellow Professor Munir Pirmohamed (Liverpool) who will discuss Progress in Personalised Medicine, Emeritus Professor Terence Ryan (Oxford) on Sir William Osler and Professor Karol Sikora (London) on cancer - a disease of our time.

The Postgraduate Medical Journal publishes topical reviews, commentaries and original papers on themes across the medical spectrum. It provides continuing professional development for all doctors, from those in training, to their teachers, and active clinicians, by publishing papers on a wide range of topics relevant to clinical practice.
Papers published in the PMJ describe current practice and new developments in all branches of medicine; describe relevance and impact of translational research on clinical practice; provide background relevant to examinations; and papers on medical education and medical education research.  The FPM is a British non-profit organisation founded in the autumn of 1919 as a merger of the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler as its first president. Its initial aims were the development of educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. 
The FPM organises clinical and research meetings and publishes two journals. The FPM has since 1925 published the international journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. In 2012 the Fellowship launched a new international journal, Health Policy and Technology, published on the Fellowship's behalf by Elsevier.