Skip to content

Discover the Wellcome Book Prize 2018

The Wellcome Book Prize longlist for 2018 has been announced, celebrating the many ways in which literature can illuminate the breadth and depth of our relationship with health, medicine and illness.

The longlist of twelve titles was selected by a judging panel chaired by artist and writer Edmund de Waal OBE with Dr Hannah Critchlow, Bryony Gordon, Sumit Paul-Choudhury and Sophie Ratcliffe.

The 2018 longlist:

This year’s longlist features three novels about the different stages of love, life, birth and death. The three memoirs in contention offer a powerful insight into the impact of addiction, trauma, and near-death experiences.

Death and mortality are also explored through palliative care workers and an attempt to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. The list includes the science of our cells to the science of our minds, and looks to both the history and the future of medical science.

Five debut books appear on this year’s longlist: Stay With Me, The Butchering Art In Pursuit of Memory, To Be a Machine and With the End in Mind.

Edmund de Waal commented on behalf of the judging panel:

“The Wellcome Book Prize is unique in its reach across genres, and so the range of books that we have considered has been exhilarating in its extent and ambition. This is a remarkable time for readers, with a great flourishing of writing on ideas around science, medicine and health, lives and deaths, histories and futures. After passionate discussions we have arrived at our longlist for the Wellcome Book Prize 2018 and are proud to be part of this process of bringing to a wider public these 12 tremendous books that have moved, intrigued and inspired us. All of them bring something new to our understanding of what it is to be human.”

The shortlist for the prize will be announced on Tuesday 20 March, with the winner revealed at an evening ceremony on Monday 30 April at Wellcome Collection.

Get involved.

Share your thoughts about the chosen books on Twitter and Instagram using #WBP2018.
Find out more about the books on the Wellcome Book Prize website.
Take a look at the Wellcome Book Prize winner from 2017.
Do you work in a library? You can order free promotional materials for the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist.

Comments

Log in or Sign up to add a comment

News

Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

Resources

How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

News

Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

View our other programmes