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Wellcome Book Prize shortlist 2018

The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘Mayhem: A memoir’ answers questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

In any quiet room, preferably on a sofa. I never write or even edit in my office at Granta – there are too many people coming and going, catching up. I also don’t write much in my study at home, which is full of manuscripts and projects and reminders of this and that.

What research did you do for ‘Mayhem: A memoir’?

‘Mayhem’ is a meditation on addiction, posing questions rather than answering them, but I read many memoirs and other books, and quite a few scientific papers. Addiction is a highly politicised field, particularly in America, and the research is easily ignored if it’s not politically palatable. I wanted to problematise various questions, including what we mean by ‘treatment’ – we use the term as though we know what it is, but in fact it varies greatly. 

There is such a lack of clarity around addiction – it is one of the last unsolved social conundrums, entangled with criminalisation, poverty and mental illness. Left to themselves, addicts are tragically likely to not survive. Families, social workers, psychiatrists, GPs, therapists and the police do what they can, but ultimately responsibility lies with the addicts themselves – and more often than not they fiercely resist all attempts to help them.

‘Bonjour Tristesse’ by Françoise Sagan, in preparation for Granta’s summer issue on gender, power and desire, and Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lost Daughter’. 

The Ferrante is such an interesting book, more crudely psychoanalytic than her Naples quartet – the text revels in rotten fruit and broken glass; beauty turns ugly – but addressing similar themes of violence and maternal abandonment. It’s interesting and unsettling to read the two together – Ferrante’s book is about a woman who has lost (and had earlier abandoned) her now grown-up children, while Sagan’s novella is about a young motherless woman released from convent school, absorbed by an intense and playful love for her father, and, almost incidentally, a young lover. Both books are really about the nature of fate, and the profound consequences of unthinking acts.

What’s in your mental-health first-aid kit?

All the usual things... Walks, books, conversation. Hugging my dog.

Perhaps for me, a born sceptic, that scepticism itself is helpful only in moderation.

The winner of the Wellcome Book Prize will be announced on 30 April 2018.

Jennifer is the Digital Content Manager for Wellcome Collection. She likes words, thinks you can do more with less and has an academic background in twentieth-century literature. You can call her Jen.

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Jennifer Trent Staves

@jenstaves

Author

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘Stay With Me’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

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We talk to the shortlisted authors to hear their perspectives on writing, research and well-being.

Wellcome Book Prize Authors Revealed

Sigrid Rausing’s prescription for writing

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘Stay With Me’ answers questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

I can write anywhere because I’m able to tune out my surroundings quite effectively when I need to, but I do tend to work in my bedroom most of the time. I’m usually exceptionally productive during writing residencies.

What research did you do for ‘Stay With Me’?

Infertility is central, even pivotal, in ‘Stay with Me’, and because of this I carried out a lot of research into that condition. I was particularly interested in both the physiological and psychosomatic aspects of being infertile. To understand all of that, I read scientific articles from a number of research journals. I also read personal accounts, in short and long form, by people who had lived with and even continue to live with some of the conditions I wrote about in the novel. My research into sickle-cell anaemia involved studying relevant scientific journals and interviewing people who have the disease.

‘Ponti’ by Sharlene Teo, ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ by Michel Faber and ‘Oneiron’ by Laura Lindstedt.

Long talks with my sister, sleep, prayer, exercise, meditation and time off social media.

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Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s prescription for writing

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘With The End in Mind’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

Anywhere that’s quiet. The ‘place’ is more a state of mind: a feeling that there is something to be written, and an urgency to capture it before it wanders off. 

If I’m developing an idea, I prefer a pencil and paper, and I write anywhere: trains, park benches, cafés. If I’m typing, I’m usually at our kitchen table, which overlooks the garden and is within easy reach of the kettle. Writing seems to require tea: although the tea remains cooling and ignored once the process kicks in. 

What research did you do for ‘With The End in Mind’?

The book is a distillation of 40 years’ clinical experience, so the research was mainly about what is already out there, and consideration of the ways in which other writers had condensed clinical experience. 

My study began to fill with public-facing books about medicine, death, mourning and the human condition. I’d maintained an intermittent ‘diary’ of thought-provoking experiences across my career and was interested to hear an academic colleague describe this as ‘field notes’. That made it feel like bona fide research!

Greta Stoddart’s ‘Alive Alive O’ – poetry about life and death. Sometimes gentle, sometimes zinging; sit-you-up metaphor and glorious language. Philip Pullman’s ‘Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling’ – a collection of his essays and lectures. Somehow, he makes the experience feel like a conversation between an enthusiastic Master and an apprentice in whom he has every confidence. Humbling and inspiring at the same time.

And also the rest of the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist (thanks, everyone).

Tea.
 Fresh air and wilderness, preferably in sunshine, although really heavy rain is good, too. 
 Special people.
 Gardening, or even thinking about gardening. Planting seeds, watching the miracle of growth, feeling that annual anticipation of spring.
 More tea.
 My hens, their still-warm brown eggs – even shovelling chicken droppings.
 ‘This, too, will pass.’
 Singing – loudly, and until breathless.
 Gratitude.
 And tea.

The precious sense of wellbeing is so easy to take for granted. I enjoyed it carelessly for more than 50 years before I was brought to recognise it by losing it for a while. I am grateful for the experience, but hope not to repeat it.

I took up running in my 30s. It has shown me how even ‘unsporty’ bodies can be vehicles for the exhilaration of achieving new goals. I still have to make myself run, but always feel better afterwards. 

I have written for wellbeing all my life. It restores perspective and clarifies difficulties, celebrates the joys and consoles the heartbreaks. This is the first time I have shared my personal writings. But I won’t be sharing the teenage poems!

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘With the End in Mind’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

Kathryn Mannix’s prescription for writing

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘The Butchering Art’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

Without a question, I do my best work at home in my office. I’ve never been one of those people who can write easily in cafés or other public spaces. I need privacy and quiet to create.  

What research did you do for ‘The Butchering Art’?

I relied on both primary and secondary research when writing ‘The Butchering Art’. Most of my sources came from libraries and collections around Britain. A large number of Joseph Lister’s case notes and letters are housed at the Wellcome Library and the Royal College of Surgeons in London. 

As this was meant to be a popular history (rather than an academic history), I spent much of my time figuring out what material to discard when writing the book so that the narrative was accessible, fast-paced and entertaining. As a result, the book is not a complete biography of Joseph Lister, but rather a snapshot into his most formative years as he was developing his antiseptic techniques. 

‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders. It’s one of the most original and thought-provoking novels that I’ve read in a very long time.  

A bag of Sweet & Salty Propercorn always seems to put the world right! Also, having a solid support system in the way of friends and family is important. 

I have hypermobile joints, which means I’m often in pain. If you see me walking around London dragging a small suitcase behind me, it’s because I can’t carry heavy bags on my shoulder. 

As a writer, I have to sit still for large stretches of the day. I’ve had to adjust my habits to ensure my joints don’t get locked up in the process. Like most people with chronic health problems, I take it a day at a time. I’ve learned not to take my mobility for granted! 

Book your free ticket to hear Lindsay in conversation with four of the other shortlisted authors on Saturday 28 April.

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Lindsey Fitzharris’s prescription for writing

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The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘To Be a Machine’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

Unfortunately I seem to be one of those precious-flower writers who need certain kinds of favourable conditions to prevail before I can get any writing done. I need quiet and solitude, and not just the lack of distraction but also the absolute neutralisation of even the threat of distraction. 

I’ve no idea why I’m like this, and it is no way to live. Given the presence of the above conditions, I can sometimes be moderately productive while working at my standing desk in the spare room in my house.

What research did you do for ‘To Be a Machine’?

I spent about a year and half travelling around and reporting for the book, mostly in America. I spent time with various transhumanists, and immersed myself in their ideas and social milieu. 

I read a lot of books about the history of technology, artificial intelligence, cybernetics and so on, as well as quite a bit of science fiction, where many transhumanist ideas originate.

I’m reading ‘Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility’, by the Italian theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. It’s a bleak, fascinating and occasionally exhilarating assessment of our current political impasse, which attempts to imagine an escape from the stranglehold of capitalism. 

I’m also reading ‘Hamlet’ by William Shakespeare, which is actually quite good.

Turning off push notifications on my phone, that's been good. As has moderate amounts of yoga. 

I’m also a big fan of strolling, which is really just a matter of approaching the act of walking with a certain combination of insouciance and purposiveness. If you’re already walking somewhere, you might as well go ahead and convert it into a stroll, is my attitude.

I have definitely learned to take sleeping more seriously over the last year or so. It took me a long time to really properly notice it, but if I get a good night’s sleep I’m just a better person, who has a better and more healthy experience of being alive. 

My wife and I are about to have a baby, though, so that’s obviously going out the window for the next while.

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Mark O’Connell’s prescription for writing

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Wellcome Book Prize 2018

The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘The Vaccine Race’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

I wrote ‘The Vaccine Race’ almost entirely in my basement office in our home in Arlington, Virginia – a suburb of Washington, DC. There, I could be found five-to-seven days a week, depending on manuscript deadlines. Today I’m back in the hurly-burly as a reporter for ‘Science’ magazine, one train ride and a world away from the suburban quiet. Yet somehow I put words together in my downtown office, too. 

The when of writing is as important to me as the where: I am much my best writing self between 9am and 3pm, especially in those morning hours when I am rested, fresh and focused. 

What research did you do for ‘The Vaccine Race’?

My most important sources were the two key characters in the book, cell biologist Leonard Hayflick and rubella vaccine inventor Stanley Plotkin. Both men, although well into their 80s, were extremely generous with their time, allowing me to conduct tens of hours of interviews and, in Plotkin’s case, opening to me his private papers packed in cardboard boxes in his basement. 

They contained crucial, formerly untold and very human details about the race for the vaccine. Several libraries and archives, and the medical literature itself, were also important. And during a research trip to Sweden, I found people and places that were key to the tale.

I’m reading ‘The Radium Girls’ by Kate Moore, a gripping, horrifying non-fiction account of young female factory workers in the US who were lethally poisoned by radium paint that was used to paint glow-in-the-dark watch faces, beginning in 1917. 

What is deeply shocking is that the companies, with the collusion of hired doctors and other ‘experts’, not only denied their illnesses and fought furiously in court against the handful of women who found the strength to sue them even as they wasted away, but that the firms continued hiring women to work with the lethal paint even after they knew of its toxic effects. 

Walking the dogs. They bring me back to the moment and to what’s vital with their joyful, complete immersion in nature. Exercise. As much as it’s hard, I attend a ‘boot camp’ outdoor exercise class and jog regularly. I never regret these aerobic bursts. My body thanks me for them every time. 

Female friendships. I am deliberate about maintaining several close friendships with women; for my money, they are as good as any therapy, and better. 

Plenty of sleep. I have become religious about getting eight hours a night since I was diagnosed with sleep apnoea several years ago. It’s crucial for my wellbeing.

I have learned that my body, mind and spirit are inextricably linked and that I neglect any one of them at my peril. For a long time, I treated my body in particular as a machine, expecting it to carry me quickly and furiously forward so long as I gave the mental order for it to do so. 

With age (I’m 57), I have come to treat my body with more respect – to be sensitive to its needs (sleep, good food, exercise) and, similarly, to the needs of my mind (learning, stimulation, exploration) and spirit (fun, intimacy and relaxation, to name a few).

Book your free ticket to hear Meredith in conversation with four of the other shortlisted authors on Saturday 28 April.

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Meredith Wadman’s prescription for writing

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Wellcome Book Prize Authors Revealed

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