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Hypochondriac study shortlisted for year's best book related to medicine

Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon, Research Fellow at the School of English, University of Kent, has been shortlisted for the first Wellcome Trust Book Prize for the year's best book related to medicine.

Published by Penguin, Tormented Hope explores, through the stories of nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - the way the mind works with, and against, the body.

The book has been described by The Times as one in which '[Brian] Dillon contends that the triumph of most of his hypochondriacs is not that they accomplished their works and deeds despite their illnesses, but that they used the condition of fragile health as a means of living their lives in productive ways'. The Independent described it as 'a book you will keep putting down, both to absorb what he has said and to postpone reaching the end. There is no higher compliment.'

The Wellcome Trust Book Prize was created to celebrate the best of medicine in literature by awarding £25,000 each year for the finest fiction or non-fiction book centred around medicine. By establishing the Book Prize, the Wellcome Trust aims to stimulate interest, excitement and debate about medicine and literature, reaching audiences not normally engaged with medical science. The 2009 judges include: Jo Brand (chair); Gwyneth Lewis, poet and Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts; and science journalist, broadcaster and critic Quentin Cooper.

Brian Dillon said: 'I'm honoured to have my book shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. The book is about a rather neglected aspect of medicine, but it's also about fear, hope and imagination: the stuff, traditionally, of literature rather than clinical investigations. One of the exciting things about this prize is that it rewards literary merit as much as research or expertise, so it promises to bring different disciplines together in very interesting ways.'

Brian Dillon joined the University of Kent in 2008 to work on a research project titled Ruins of the Twentieth Century. He is currently the UK editor of the New York-based cultural magazine Cabinet and a contributing editor at Art Review. He is a regular contributor to national newspapers such as The Guardian. His previous books include In The Dark Room (Penguin).

Contact: mediaoffice@kent.ac.uk

Story published at 9:59am 9 October 2009