Wellcome Book Prize 2015 - Authors in Conversation

Celebrating the best new books that engage with some aspect of medicine, health or illness, the Wellcome Book Prize 2015 shortlist showcases the breadth and depth of our encounters with medicine through six exceptional works of fiction and non-fiction.Join four of the shortlisted authors as they discuss the creative process behind their critically acclaimed books while exploring the broader context of medicine and literature: Marion Coutts, author of The Iceberg, Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm, Sarah Moss, author of Bodies of Light and Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows. Acclaimed writer, journalist and socialist, Anne Karpf, will facilitate the session.

Marion Coutts, author of The Iceberg
Marion Coutts (50) is an artist, writer, and lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. The Iceberg is an exploration of the impact of death in real time, a sustained act of looking that only ends when life does. It gives an account of a small family unit under assault, and the inventiveness by which they tried to stay together.

Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm
Henry Marsh (65) became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley's/St George's Hospital in London in 1987, where he still works full time. He has been the subject of two major documentary films, Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, featuring his work in the Ukraine, which won an Emmy. He was made a CBE in 2010 and was on the judging panel for the Wellcome Book Prize 2012. Do No Harm is an astonishingly candid insight into the life and work of a modern neurosurgeon – its triumphs and disasters.

Sarah Moss, author of Bodies of Light
Sarah Moss (39) is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. She is the author of two novels: Cold Earth (2010) and Night Waking (2011), which was selected for the Fiction Uncovered Award in 2011, as well as Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland (2012), which was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2013. Bodies of Light is a profound and provocative book about family and a radically modern novel with a 19th-century setting. It is a gripping story told with rare precision and tenderness.

Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba, in Canada. She has published six novels - including A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth and All My Puny Sorrows - and a memoir of her father, Swing Low. Toews is the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Governor General's Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award (twice), and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews is a story of sisters, suicide and how to carry on with hope when grief loads the heart.