2012 International Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The Hippocrates Prize is amongst the best funded awards anywhere in the world for a single poem.

The Hippocrates initiative received the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.

Entries are now closed for the 2012 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

1. Open category - for any national or international entry: 1st Prize £5000.
2. National Health Service-related entries limited to current or former UK NHS-related staff and UK health students: 1st Prize £5000.
3. Entries must be in English, unpublished and a maximum of 50 lines of text, excluding title or line breaks.

Judges for the 2012 Hippocrates Awards

US poet and critic Marilyn Hacker

Broadcaster and journalist Martha Kearney

Medical researcher Professor Rod Flower FRS

Short-listing will take place in London on 4th April, 2012

2012 Hippocrates Awards will by announced by the judges on Saturday 12th May in London at an International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine.

Registration is open for the Awards Symposium

Supporters of the 2012 Awards

Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine Cardiovascular Research Trust

Hippocrates poetry and medicine initiative short-listed for 2011 Times Higher Education awards

2011 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2011 Hippocrates Awards Symposium included readings by New York poet Marilyn Hacker and former Welsh National Poet Gwyneth Lewis

2011 Hippocrates Open Awards

▪ 1st Prize: Michael Henry (Cheltenham, England) - The Patella Hammer

▪ 2nd Prize: Cheryl Moskowitz (London, England) - Correspondence with the Care Home

▪ 3rd Prize: Johanna Emeney (Albany, New Zealand) - Radiologist's Report 

2011 Hippocrates NHS Awards

▪ 1st Prize: Paula Cunningham (Belfast, N Ireland) - The Chief Radiographer Considers

▪ 2nd Prize: Wendy French (London, England) - The Doctor's Wife

3rd Prize: Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood (Cambridge, England) - Inappropriate ADH

The 2011 Hippocrates Award judges

Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine

  Heads, Teachers and Industry

  Cardiovascular Research Trust

2011 International Hippocrates Prize and Symposium reports and news

May 7 2011: Guardian Review article by Mark Lawson on poetry, medicine and the Hippocrates Prize

May 7 2011: 2011 Hippocrates Prize winners announced

March 2011: The Huffington Post flags 2011 Hippocrates Prize shortlist

March 2011: Top 6 shortlist announced for 2011 Hippocrates Prize

January 2011: BBC Radio 4’s Mark Lawson joins panel of judges for Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2011

January 2011: Hippocrates Prize featured in the The Times (Eureka) - 6th Jan Edition

January 2011: Postgraduate Medical Journal - Editorial on poetry as medical humanity by Michael Hulse and Donald Singer Postgrad Med J January 2011;87(1023):1-2

December 2010: BMJ Careers feature - Johanna Shapiro [Irvine, CA] and Sarah Mourra [Yale] ask whether poems make you a better doctor

December 2010: Press release - aspiring young poets encouraged: comment by Clare Pollard who published her first poems aged 16

December 2010: Thanks to the following for information passed on about the 2011 Prize: Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Psychiatrists, Royal College of General Practitioners, national assocation of writers in education, Australian Society of Authors, Writer's Hub, The Poetry Kit, WriteOutLoud, The Writers' Guild, Russell Group,

November 2010: Lapidus Journal article - Poetry and Medicine at Warwick by Michael Hulse and Donald Singer

November 2010: Thanks for 2011 Prize web-posting to Poetry Library, SouthBank Centre, New Zealand Poetry Society, Academic Resources, Prize Do, Write Out Loud, Beattie's Blog, History of Medicine, Society for Academic Primary Care, The BookTrib, Lapidus, Sutton Coldfield Grammar, Russell Group,

November 2010: Press release: national poet outgoing UK family doctor chief to judge the 2011 Hippocrates Prize

October 2010: Simon and Schuster flag entries for the 2011 Hippocrates Prize

October 2010: 2011 Hippocrates Prize now also supported by Head Teachers and Industry and Cardiovascular Research Trust

October 2010: British Medical Journal - Medical Humanities blog re 2011 Hippocrates Prize - Call for applications

2010 International Hippocrates Awards

2010 Commended entries

2010 Top 300 entries

More on the 2010 International Hippocrates Prize

2010 Inaugural International Hippocrates Prize: Press and publications

20.3.10 Lancet article on Poetry and Medicine
23.3.10 Radio 4 Today Interview with John Humphrys 
23.3.10 BBC World Service Newshour Interview with Claire Bolderson
24.3.10 The Independent on the Prize Shortlist - 'Verse that will make you feel better'
10.4.10 Winners of 2010 Hippocrates Prize awards announced.
13.4.10 BMJ News. 2010;340:c2023 Winning NHS poem takes a doctor's life as its inspiration doi:10.1136/bmj.c2023
15.4.10 Warwick blog re awards symposium 

See Hippocrates Poetry website for list of top 6 awards, top 20 commended NHS-related entries and top 20 commended Open international entries .

Awards were announced on Saturday 10th April, 2010 during the International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine at Warwick Arts Centre.

Awards were presented by judges broadcaster and journalist James Naughtie, NHS Medical Director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, and poet Dannie Abse.

A book of the 6 award winning and 40 commended poems has been published - cost £8 + postage and packaging (£4 + P & P for Commended entrants).

Anthology order form.

CPT Newsletter 'Poetry and Medicine' entries 2008

Winning entry

• Beth Harrison: 'The Journey'

Commended

• Julia Barclay: ‘Clinic 9’
• Jamie Brindle: ‘The Executive Suite’
• Pete Sweeney: ‘Odd Ode’

Judges' report

Michael Hulse - Editor, The Warwick Review
on behalf of the panel

Associate Professor
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick

At first glance, writing a poem on a medical subject may seem an unusual and even a daunting challenge. We often think that poetry expresses the emotions. Where does that leave the routines of the ward or operating theatre? In fact poetry, in its thousands of years to date, has expressed every aspect of human experience. It has told of warfare and heroic exploits, it has described the life of religious faith, it has offered scientific and philosophical accounts of the world, it has presented social and political facts and arguments—and of course it has talked of love and death and the feelings these and other experiences prompt in us. Today, the truth is that poetry can be about anything at all.

Beth Harrison’s winning poem, ‘The Journey’, might almost have been written on purpose to illustrate this point. Who would have thought a poem could be written about the passage of a new blood cell around the body? Beth Harrison’s achievement here is to take the time-honoured allegory of travel, with all of its physical obstacles and all its trials of endurance, and apply it not to the whole human creature’s journey through life but, on a much smaller scale, to the equally arduous progress of one of the human’s infinitesimal component parts. The poem is rich in its language and imagination. It is fired by an archaic, even primæval sense of the physical world. It is an altogether unusual piece of writing, and a worthy winner.

But the poems entered in the competition were of various kinds, and took a variety of approaches to medical experience, with highly readable results. The judges felt they wanted to commend three other poems as well. Julia Barclay’s ‘Clinic 9’ offers an arresting account of one daily hospital routine, in which the clinic seems to have a life of its own, and the human beings who work there or attend as patients never appear as individuals but function as generic parts of a de-personalised process. In ‘The Executive Suite’, Jamie Brindle brings a waspishly envious fantasy to bear on the well-known (but apparently mysterious!) suite of the title, bouncing us along in jocular rhyming tetrameter. And Pete Sweeney’s ‘Odd Ode’ offers a jaundiced take on NHS life, setting the everyday rhythms in the wider context of the world’s troubles and, in its sting-in-the-tail ending, adopting a sceptical stance on cure.

The poems entered were a lively crop, and the judges offer congratulations all round, especially to the winner and the three commended poets.

Well done!

Poetry Panel

Michael Hulse, English and Comparative Literary Studies*;
Prithwish Banerjee, Cardiology^
Donald RJ Singer, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics*^, Warwick Medical School
University of Warwick*; University Hospital^

Helpful links

Medicine and Poetry. EP Scarlett. CMAJ. 1937;36:73–79.

History of Poetry as Therapy

Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine 

Journal of Poetry Therapy

Journal of the American Medical Association: Poetry and Medicine

Poetry and Healthcare resources

PB Shelley - Hymn of Apollo

Stanford: Poetry in Medicine

The Poetry Kit

The Poetry Society

The Poetry Library

Poetry Foundation

Poetry International

  @HippoetPrize

Blog on Health, Arts and Science

Register for 12 May 2012 Hippocrates Awards Symposium in London

Download 2012 Awards Symposium flyerEntries for the 2013 Hippocrates Awards will open 12 July 2012

Hippocrates Initiative

Medicine and poetry news

Top 10 poems

Nominate your favourite poem on a medical theme

2012 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Programme for 2011 Symposium on Poetry and Medicine and Hippocrates Prize Awards