Kate Adie, Jennifer Clement and Professor Dame Jane Dacre are the judges for the 2019 Hippocrates international Open and Health Professional awards for poetry and medicine. Elizabeth Smither will judge the Hippocrates international Young Poet Prize for Poetry and Medicine.
Awards in the Hippocrates Prize are for an unpublished poem in English of up to 50 lines on a medical theme by entrants from anywhere in the world. Previous winners have come from Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.
There are 3 categories in the Hippocrates Prize, all international.
- The Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine
- The Hippocrates Health Professional Prize for Poetry and Medicine
- The Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine
Kate Adie
Kate became a familiar figure through her work as BBC Chief News Correspondent (photograph © Ken Lennox). She is the long-serving presenter of Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent and a presenter or contributor to many other radio and television programmes. She has served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, now the Bailey’s, and the Whitbread, now the Costa Prize, and recently, the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Kate was honoured with a Bafta Fellowship in 2018 and received a CBE in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours list. Other awards include:
- Royal Television Society Reporter of the Year 1980, for her coverage of the SAS end to the Iranian Embassy siege.
- Winner, 1981 & 1990, Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph Award.
- The Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award 1990.
Kate is considered to be among the most reliable
reporters, as well as one of the first British women to send despatches
from danger zones around the world. As a television news correspondent, Kate’s memorable assignments
include both Gulf Wars, four years of war in the Balkans, the final NATO
intervention in Kosovo and elections in 2000; the Herald of Free
Enterprise disaster at Zeebrugge, the massacre at Dunblane, the Selby
rail crash, the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy Siege in London, the
Bologna railway station bombing and the Tiananmen Square protest in
Beijing in 1989. Kate carried out numerous assignments in Northern Ireland throughout
"The Troubles" as well as reporting on the referendum to ratify the Good
Friday Agreement. Kate covered the Lockerbie bombing and reported from
Libya after the London Embassy siege of 1984, reporting from Libya many
times thereafter, including the bombing of Tripoli by the US in 1986.
She also covered the Rwandan Genocide and the British military
intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
Kate grew up in Sunderland and gained her BA from Newcastle University where she read Swedish. Kate has served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum and is a trustee of Sunderland Football Foundation. Kate has honorary degrees from universities including Newcastle,
Bath, Nottingham, Cardiff and St Andrews and is Honorary Professor of
Journalism at Sunderland University.
Jennifer Clement
Jennifer Clement is the President of PEN International and the first woman to be elected President in 100 years (photograph by Omar Meneses). Under her leadership the PEN International Women’s Manifesto was created. Her books have been translated into 30 languages. She lives in Mexico City. Clement has published four books of poetry including The Next Stranger (with an introduction by W.S. Merwin). She is the author of A True Story Based on Lies, The Poison That Fascinates, Prayers for the Stolen and Gun Love. She also wrote the acclaimed memoir Widow Basquiat on New York City in the 1980’s and the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
She is the recipient of the Canongate Prize, Sara Curry Humanitarian Award, the Gran Prix des Lectrices Lyceenes de ELLE, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and her books have twice been a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book. Prayers for the Stolen was both a PEN/Faulkner Prize and Femina Prize finalist. Her recent novel Gun Love is an Oprah Book Club Selection as well as being a National Book Award finalist.
Jennifer Clement studied English Literature and Anthropology at New
York University and also studied French literature in Paris, France. She
has an MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast MFA program at USM.
Jane Dacre
Professor Dame Jane Dacre DBE, MD, FRCP is a consultant rheumatologist and Professor of Medical Education. She is the immediate past president of the RCP and was vice chair of the AoMRC, Director of UCL Medical School, MD of MRCPUK and academic VP of the RCP. She is the lead for the DHSC independent review into the gender pay gap in medicine, and the President of the Medical Protection Society.
She won the medicine and healthcare category 2012 of Women in the City
Woman of Achievement Award; was named on the HSJ inaugural list of 50
inspirational women in healthcare in 2013; was named in the science and
medicine category for people of influence Debrett’s 500 in 2015, 2016 and 2017; and was named on the HSJ top 100 list from 2014 to 2017.
Elizabeth Smither
Elizabeth Smither is a New Zealand poet. She has published 18 collections of poetry, was Te Mata Poet Laureate (2001-3), and was awarded an Hon DLitt by Auckland University and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2008. She also writes novels, journals and short stories, and is widely published in Australia, Britain and USA. She was awarded the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2016 and her most recent poetry collection, Night Horse, won the Ockham NZ Book Award for poetry in 2018.
Smither’s first collection, Here Come the Clouds Professor Musgrove’s Canary, published in her mid-30s, at once established her distinctive, even idiosyncratic, poetic manner. The short poem, usually but not always unrhymed, witty, stylish and intellectually curious, has remained her forte. As the titles of her collections suggest, literary and legendary figures often provide starting points for poems, a number of which are also characterised by a strong interest in Catholicism. In addition to more perennial subjects, her poetry, though never merely self-referential, celebrates the slipperiness and paradoxical nature of language. She has remarked that the poets she most admires are ‘tough’, citing as examples Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, William Empson and John Berryman: ‘They don’t pull any punches; they’re like Humphrey Bogart. You have to use all your senses to crack them open.’ The same comment applies to the best of her own work.
