The Hippocrates Initiative
for Poetry and Medicine
2025 Prize
The 2025 Hippocrates Prize will open on 1 November 2024, submissions close on 14 February 2025.
About Us
The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine was founded in 2009 by Professors Donald Singer and Michael Hulse. The founders wished to draw together national and international perspectives on three major historical and contemporary themes uniting the disciplines of poetry and medicine: medicine as inspiration for the writings of poets; effects of poetic creativity on the experience of illness by patients, their families, friends, and carers; and poetry as therapy.
2024 Hippocrates Prize:
Prize Winners
HEALTH PROFESSIONAL CATEGORY
1st Prize: Vicki Husband (Scotland)
Non-essential poem
Vicki Husband’s first poetry book, This Far Back Everything Shimmers, was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2016. She has also published a pamphlet-long poem, Sykkel Saga. Vicki has worked as an OT in NHS community rehabilitation in Glasgow for 20 years. Vicki is currently completing a second poetry collection related to health and the city, which she hopes to be published in Spring 2025.
The inspiration for Non-essential poem came from working in community rehabilitation during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the streets were empty and human contact was limited. As face-to-face appointments were substituted, by necessity, for virtual ones in many areas of the NHS, she continued to visit patients in their homes and it quicky became clear how much was being lost through lack of human contact
2nd Prize: Renee Rossi (USA)
Belief in Anything is an Attempt to Label the Mystery
Renée Rossi’s first full length poetry collection, Triage, was published by Lost Horse Press, in 2016. Chapbooks include Motherboard, runner up for the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize, Still Life, winner of the 2009 Gertrude Press Prize, and Third Worlds. She practiced Otolaryngology for 30 years, is trained in holistic medicine (Ayurveda), and currently teaches integrative medicine courses.
This poem is a meditation on its title, a quote from Chögyam Trungpa's book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. It’s a conflation of universal memory and suffering.
3rd Prize (Joint): Elizabeth Osmond (England)
I wish I could write you a prescription for time
Elizabeth Osmond is a consultant in neonatal medicine at the university hospital in Bristol, UK (UHBW Bristol). She writes poetry as a form of reflective practice and her work has been published in various literary and medical journals including the Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Atrium, Ink Sweat and Tears and the Public Sector Poetry Journal. In 2021 she won third prize in the Health professionals category of the Hippocrates Prize and she is delighted to have been placed again this year. She has written an article published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood on the benefits of poetry for reflection (DOI:10.1136/archdischild-2021-322527).
I wish I could write you a prescription for time is a poem which explores premature birth. It aims to encompass the grief and loss experienced by parents and healthcare professionals when a pregnancy cannot continue any longer, but also to celebrate the premature babies she cares for and their families.
3rd Prize (Joint): Tamar Rubin (Canada)
Cadaver Lab
Tamar Rubin is a pediatric clinical immunologist and allergist, poet, and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her first poetry collection, Tablet Fragments, was published in 2020, and shortlisted for 6 awards. Her work has previously appeared in literary and medical journals, and anthologies, including JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal and The Examined Life. She is currently finessing her next poetry collection, which examines the genetics of experience.
Cadaver Lab was inspired by the sensory memory of her early days of medical school in the anatomy lab, and its transformative impact.
OPEN CATEGORY
1st Prize: Claudia Daventry (Scotland)
Sagrada Familia
Claudia is a poet living and writing in Scotland, where she is acting co-chair at the Scottish Poetry Library. Her education and interests range from languages and the natural world to music and health. Her work has been widely published and she has won several awards, including first place in the Bridport and Ruskin prizes and in the 2019 Hippocrates open prize for for my Valentine in an fMRI Scanner.
Sagrada Familia is inspired by Claudia’s own experience growing up with - and more recent adult care of - a sister affected by cerebral palsy in a world that does not easily accommodate invisible or physical disability.
2nd Prize: Rachel Davies (England)
This is Not a Poem about Dementia
Rachel Davies’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies. Her debut pamphlet, Every Day I Promise Myself, was published by 4Word Press (December 2020). She has a joint collection with Hilary Robinson due for publication in the summer (Beautiful Dragons Press): An Altogether Different Place is a collection of poems about dementia and caring.
She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry, both from MMU.
3rd Prize (Joint): Julia Levine (USA)
Catalogue of Infant Leukemia
Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her most recent poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms, (LSU Press, 2021), the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU, 2014), and the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry from Nimrod, the Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Prize, the Discovery/The Nation Award, as well as the Anhinga Press Poetry Prize and The Tampa Review Poetry prize for her first two collections. Widely published and anthologized, currently she is the Poet Laureate of Davis, as well as a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellow for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. Further information about Julia B. Levine is available here.
From Julia:
This long poem, Catalog of Infant Leukeumia, is part of a larger collection, titled Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction. My grandson’s diagnosis of infant leukemia and the gruelling battle of his treatment, sent my family into a state of purgatory not unlike the one we are living in regarding our planet (How long do we have? Will it be okay, or not? How do we love what may die too soon? How do we not love this baby, our earth?). Cataloging this heart-wrenching, terrifying experience was perhaps the only way I knew to cope. And no matter my grandson’s outcome, I would have something of him to keep.
3rd Prize (Joint): James Norcliffe (New Zealand)
The Chest Clinic, Armagh St
James Norcliffe is a New Zealand writer, currently living near Christchurch. He has published fiction, many fantasy novels for young people and poetry.
James has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play (2013), Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP, 2016), Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023).
Recent work has appeared in Landfall, The Asheville Poetry Review, Best Small Fictions 2023, Gargoyle, Rhino, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Flash Fiction International.
In 2022 he was awarded the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry and the following year, the Margaret Mahy Medal for children's writing.
From James:
As a young man, my father contracted TB. In the days before modern antibiotics, a very serious disease. He was hospitalised in a sanitarium high in the dry hills above Christchurch going in a skinny 9-stone and re-emerging two years later a 13-stone Michelin man, but cured. Some time later, a shadow was found on my mother's lung and she was monitored regularly through x-rays at a chest clinic in the city. As my sister and I were considered at risk, we were regularly x-rayed too, first at three month, later six month, intervals throughout my childhood.
As the poem suggests, especially in the early days, it was a very apprehensive time for us all, but especially for my mother.
YOUNG POETS PRIZE
1st Prize: Emily Pickering (USA)
Meditation in the Parking Lot of the Fort Wayne Outpatient
Surgery Center
Emily Pickering is a senior at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, USA. Her writing has appeared in Narrative, Rattle, Dialogist, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, the Adroit Prizes, and the Youth Poet Laureate Program.
From Emily:
This poem was loosely inspired by a surgery I had several years ago. I was drawn to the mostly mental practice of healing and also wanted to interrogate the idea of healing as a developing and dynamic process. How is the way we remember an event influenced by the way we feel now? How do we reconcile the body with the mind before and after an event like surgery?
New Publication
The Hippocrates Press is delighted to announce the release of Peter Wallis's remarkable debut poetry collection, 'Half Other,' now available on our website's online store. Secure your copy today and delve into the captivating world of Wallis's poetic brilliance.
NEW!
Hippocrates Initiative Committee
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Dr Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias
PRESIDENT
Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias is a Senior Lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain.
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Dr Eleanor Singer
TREASURER
Eleanor (Ellie) Singer is a doctor training to specialise in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology in Glasgow.
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Dr Ramsay Singer
SECRETARY
Ramsay Singer is a doctor specialising in cancer medicine, based in London.
Publications by Hippocrates
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