We are pleased to announce that LMH Fellow in English, Dr Sophie Ratcliffe, has been selected to judge the next Wellcome Book Prize. An annual award of £30,000, the Prize is awarded to books with a central theme that engages with aspects of medicine, health or illness. Many genres of writing typically feature in its shortlist – including crime, romance, popular science, science fiction and history. This year's panel includes experts from the fields of neuroscience, education, journalism and art, and will be chaired by artist and writer Edmund de Waal.
Dr Ratcliffe's research centres around ideas of emotion, the history of how we feel, and the relationship between health and reading. She has published on a wide range of writers from the mid-Victorian period up to the present day, and was a judge for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. She is a co-founder of The Poetry of Medicine – a series of arts-based educational workshops for NHS clinicians. Her award-winning exhibition Unsilencing the Library is ongoing at the Compton Verney Art Gallery in Warwickshire. Her current projects include a book about the history of medicine and reading, and a work of creative non-fiction to be published by William Collins in 2019.