The winners of the 2015 Hippocrates
Prize for Poetry and Medicine were announced on Friday May 22nd at an Awards
Ceremony in London at the close of an International Symposium on Poetry and
Medicine.
The £5000 First Prize in the Open
Category was awarded to teacher and writer Maya Catherine Popa
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Maya Catherine Popa
Kate Compston Parisa Thepmankorn
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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.
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
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 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).
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 was 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.
