The Wellcome Trust Book Prize celebrates the best of medicine in literature by awarding £25 000 for the finest fiction or non-fiction book centred on medicine.

This event is your chance to hear from some of the shortlisted authors about their work. Featuring both factual accounts and gripping novels, the shortlist tackles subjects from a philosophical approach to illness to a fictional account of two co-directors of a cancer research lab.

Our guests will discuss their own work as well as explore broader themes of how medicine is portrayed through literature.

Full details of all of the shortlisted authors are available here. Biographies of the authors who will be participating in this event and summaries of their books are listed below.

This event is free.

Book now to receive an e-ticket

Speakers

Havi Carel, author of 'Illness: The Cry of the Flesh'
Brian Dillon, author of 'Tormented Hope'
Allegra Goodman, author of 'Intuition'

Facilitator

Anne Karpf, writer, journalist and sociologist

This event is free.

BSL interpreted event

'Illness: The Cry for Flesh', Havi Carel, Acumen Publishing, (non-fiction)

Havi Carel is a philosopher, lecturer and writer. She is also one of only 120 women in the UK to suffer from the rare and potentially life-threatening lung disease, lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). On diagnosis, in 2006, Havi was told that her life expectancy was approximately ten years. Since then, her life has changed beyond recognition and yet, at the same time, has remained the same. Despite being young and healthy-looking, she has had to reinvent her life, rethink her aspirations and plans and, more than anything, learn to love the life she has.

While 'Illness', a unique and often moving book, is founded on Havi's experience of living with a degenerative illness, it was her training as a philosopher that pushed her to reflect more generally on the nature of health and illness. Havi explores illness by weaving together the personal story of her own illness with the insights drawn from her work as a philosopher. Too often illness is viewed as a localised biological dysfunction while ignoring the actual experience of the ill person, her fears, her hopes, the way she interacts with others and, ultimately, experiences life. This neglected dimension is the focus of this book. Havi shows how illness is a life-changing process rather than a limited physiological problem.

'Tormented Hope', Brian Dillon, Penguin Ireland, (non-fiction)

'Tormented Hope' is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings.

Healthy or unhealthy, robust or failing, ignored or obsessed over, our bodies respond daily to our shifting state of mind, whether we are aware of the process or not. This book is about an especially dramatic instance of that relationship: the mind's invention of physical disease. Through his witty, entertaining and often moving examinations of the lives of nine subjects - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, anxiety and imagination, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He writes on the arts, books and culture for a number of publications. His first book, 'In the Dark Room', won the Irish Book Award for Non-fiction. He lives in Canterbury.

'Intuition' by Allegra Goodman, Atlantic Books, (fiction)

Sandy Glass is a charismatic publicity-seeking doctor. Marion Mendelssohn is an idealistic and rigorous scientist. They are co-directors of a cancer research lab in Boston. As mentors and supervisors to their young protégés, they demand dedication and respect in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, the youngest member of their team, begin to produce encouraging results, suggesting the very real possibility of a major breakthrough, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectation.

But jealousy soon breeds suspicion and Cliff's colleague - and girlfriend - Robin Decker begins to suspect the unthinkable: that his findings are fraudulent. As Robin makes her private doubts public and Cliff maintains his innocence, a life-changing controversy engulfs the lab and everyone in it…

Allegra Goodman's 'Intuition' explores workplace intrigue, scientific ardour and the moral consequences of a rush judgement. The result is a novel as revealing about human nature as it is about the real life of science.

Allegra Goodman is the author of a number of novels and collections of short stories. Named by the 'New Yorker' as one of the 20 best American writers under 40, she has won several awards, and was shortlisted for the US National Book Award for her novel 'Kaaterskill Falls'. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'Intuition' is her first book to be published in the UK.