About Us
The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine was founded in 2009 by Professors Donald Singer and Michael Hulse. The founders aimed to unite national and international perspectives on three major themes: medicine as inspiration for poets, the impact of poetic creativity on the experience of illness, and poetry as therapy for patients, families, friends, and caregivers.
The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine awards international prizes for unpublished poems in English. Prizes are given for poems written by health professionals or medical students; for poems written by anyone anywhere (the open category); and for poems by younger writers aged between fourteen and eighteen.
The annual international conference on poetry and medicine hosts the award ceremony. In 2011, the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine received the Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.
Founders
Donald Singer and Michael Hulse co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for poetry and medicine in 2009
Michael Hulse
CO-FOUNDER
Described by Gwyneth Lewis as “a formidable poet”, Michael Hulse is a key figure in contemporary poetry. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by W. G. Sebald, Goethe and Rilke. Reading tours have taken him to Canada, the US and Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, India, and several European countries – his audience for his solo event at Adelaide Writers’ Week 2012 numbered 700. Michael has worked in publishing, television and universities, and in 2020 retired from the University of Warwick, where he taught poetry and comparative literature. His co-edited anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry was a poetry bestseller, and his most recent collection of poems, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year by John Kinsella. He co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine with Professor Donald Singer in 2009.
Donald Singer
CO-FOUNDER
Donald Singer was a clinical pharmacologist who published over 200 articles, chapters and books on medicines, on cardiovascular research, prevention and treatment, and public understanding of health. He was an editor and contributor to The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) and co-authored the prescribing safety guide the Pocket Prescriber (Taylor & Francis) now in its 8th edition since 2004. He was President of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and chaired the advisory board of the FPM’s journal Health Policy and Technology. He was also delegate to the European Medicines Agency for European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, which supports scientific and educational exchange for over 4000 clinical pharmacologists from 34 European and other countries.
Organising Committee
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Luz Mar Gonzalez-Arias
PRESIDENT
Senior Lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain.
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Eleanor Singer
TREASURER
Ellie Singer is a doctor training to specialise in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology in Glasgow. She has witnessed the benefit of The Arts as complementary therapy for many of her patients. She first became involved in the Hippocrates Initiative by helping at its events when at medical school in London and is pleased now to be a core part of the continuing the work of the Initiative.
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Ramsay Singer
SECRETARY
Ramsay Singer is a doctor specialising in cancer medicine, in London. He joined the Hippocrates Initiative committee in 2022.