20 May 2021: Winners in the 2021 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine were announced by live webcast on Wednesday 19th May to an international audience from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

First Prize in the FPM-Hippocrates Open Awards went to Fran Castan, former magazine editor, freelance writer and teacher of writing and literature from New York City, USA for Voice Mail. About her poem she said: “When my friend, the poet Siv Cedering, was suffering from pancreatic cancer, I would visit frequently. I wrote Voice Mail as witness to our experiences during her heroic struggle.”

First Prize in the FPM-Hippocrates Health Professional Awards went to Sophia Wilson from Dunedin in New Zealand for The Body Library. Sophia has a background in arts, medicine and psychiatry. 

She said: “The Body Library is a mélange of memories of the anatomy and pathology museums at Sydney University. I recall in particular the enormous sense of privilege, the bizarreness of human body parts being presented and objectified in this way, and the relief of exiting the hallowed rooms into daylight.”

Full media release with all winners here

‘The Body Library’ first published in Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2021,  hippocrates-poetry.org

Sophia Wilson has recent writing in Mayhem, Blackmail Press, Intima, Australian Poetry Anthology, Shot Glass Journal, The Poetry Archive, Landfall, A Fine Line, Not Very Quiet, Ars Medica, Hektoen International, Poetry New Zealand, Flash Frontier, Best Microfiction 2021 and elsewhere.She was runner-up in the 2020 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems and her poem ‘The Captive’s Song’ won the 2020 Robert Burns Poetry Competition. Sophia has a background in arts and medicine and is based in Aotearoa New Zealand.