The winner of the inaugural Hippocrates Young Poets £500 Prize is Rosalind Jana from Hereford Sixth Form College in England, for her poem ‘Posterior Instrumented Fusion for Adolescent Scoliosis'.
The international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. Entrants may be from young poets anywhere in the world aged 14 to 18 years. The 2013 Prize attracted entries from the UK, USA and Australia.
The winning entry was decided by judge and award-winning poet Clare Pollard, who published her first collection of poetry at the age of 19.
About the Hippocrates Young Poets Prize she said: “I'm very pleased to be judging the first Hippocrates Prize for Schools - in bringing science and art together, I hope it will deepen students’ understanding of both, and uncover poets of the future.” She added that the top entries were “extraordinarily accomplished for writers of 18 or under”.
Of Rosalind Jana’s winning poem she commented: “It is hard to believe that a poem with such an ugly name can be so beautiful, but it is an incredible display of control and craft, formally brilliant and full of striking visual imagery - the shuttered murk, the meaty spine, the cloak of skin, the ‘morphine black blown out by light’. It is both passionate and eerily detached - a deeply impressive piece of work.”
Hippocrates Prize founders clinical professor Donald Singer and poet Michael Hulse said: “We are delighted that the Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is already having an international impact in inspiring a new generation of poets.”
The Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, the National Association of Writers in Education, and the Cardiovascular Research Trust.
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.
To attend the Young Poets, NHS and Open Hippocrates Prize award ceremony in London on 18th May at the Wellcome Collection and the related Symposium on Poetry and Medicine see http://hippocrates-poetry.org
Notes to editors
For more information about Hippocrates Prize winners and extracts of
their winning poems, contact hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
About judge Clare Pollard
Clare
Pollard has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Changeling (Bloodaxe, 2011), was
a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She published her first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, with Bloodaxe in
1998 aged 19. Her play The
Weather premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and
her documentary for radio, ‘My Male Muse’, was a Radio 4 Pick of the
year. She co-edited the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century and her
new collection, Ovid’s Heroines,
will be published by Bloodaxe this year.
More about the
Hippocrates Initiative
The Hippocrates initiative was established in 2009 and
already offers two successful
annual poetry prizes, one open to submissions from
anyone anywhere in the world, the other restricted to NHS employees (present
and past) and UK health students. In each category a first prize of £5,000 is
awarded. The Hippocrates Prize has attracted thousands of entries from 55
countries, from the Americas to Fiji, from Finland to Australasia, and prizewinners
have come from New Zealand and the US as well as the UK.