The video shows winner of the inaugural Hippocrates Young Poets £500 Prize Rosalind Jana from Hereford Sixth Form College in England, reading 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The international Hippocrates Prize for Young Poets is for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme.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.”