Great news! The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee has been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2011.
The shortlist is as follows:
The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Fourth Estate)
Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Belknap Harvard)
Following his Guardian First Book Award win last week for ‘The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer‘, Siddhartha Mukherjee was interviewd by BBC Radio 4‘s The Today Programme. You can listen again here
The Guardian First Book Award shortlist has been announced and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Emperor of all Maladies’ has made the list.
4th Estate have a great history with the Guardian First Book Award, having won three times with ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’ (2005) ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ (2006) and ‘The Rest is Noise’ (2008)
The Emperor of All Maladies is longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
Congratulations to Siddhartha Mukherjee, as the Emperor of All Maladies has been longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award .
The awards recognise the finest new writing talent who have had work published in English in the last year.
The longlist will be reduced to a shortlist by the judging panel including One Day author David Nicholls. The judging panel will take advice from Guardian reading groups, run in association with Waterstones across the UK.
Read an extract of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Guardian Longlisted book below.
You can either read the extract through the reader panel on this page, or click through to our issuu page where you can download the PDF for your e-reader.
Why did you decide to write a book about cancer?
The book is a very long answer to a question first posed to me by a patient I was treating in Boston, a woman with a very aggressive form of abdominal cancer. She had been treated with chemotherapy and had relapsed and been treated again. At one point, deep into her treatment, she said to me, “I’m willing to go on, but I need to know what it is I’m battling.” My book is an attempt to answer her question by going back to the origin of the disease and showing its development through history. I called it “a biography of cancer,” because it draws a portrait of an illness over time.
Cancer is not a disease but a whole family of diseases. These diseases are linked at a fundamental biological level. They’re characterized by the pathological proliferation of cells—occasionally cells that don’t know how to die, but certainly cells that don’t know how to stop dividing. Read more…
