Wellcome Book Prize announces longlist for 2017

The Prize celebrates exceptional works of fiction and non-fiction that have breached the worlds of health and medicine

The longlist for the Wellcome Book Prize has been announced, celebrating exceptional works of fiction and non-fiction that have breached the worlds of health and medicine.

Consisting of 12 books, seven of which are non-fiction and five fiction, the list was selected by a judging panel chaired by celebrated Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, alongside Simon Baron-Cohen, Gemma Cairney, Tim Lewens, and Di Speirs.

This is the first time a longlist for the £30,000 prize has been introduced, expanding the prize's ability to honour a greater diversity of work: including the first posthumously published title in Paul Kalanithi's memoir When Breath Becomes Air, the first translated text in Maylis de Kerangal and Jessica Moore's Mend the Living, as well as the first Australian, French, and Israeli contenders.

Val McDermid commented on behalf of the panel, "The challenge of judging the Wellcome Book Prize is that we have all had to read outside our own areas of expertise. That makes demands both of the judges and of the books. This longlist is evidence of the breadth, humanity, and creativity at work in the submissions for the prize, and we commend each of these twelve books for your reading pleasure."

You can read the full longlist below.

- How to Survive a Plague (Picador) by David France (USA) non-fiction
- Homo Deus (Harvill Secker, Penguin Random House) by Yuval Noah Harari (Israel) non-fiction
- When Breath Becomes Air (The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House) by Paul Kalanithi (USA) non-fiction
- Mend the Living (MacLehose Press) by Maylis de Kerangal (France) trans. Jessica Moore fiction
- The Golden Age (Europa Editions) by Joan London (Australia) fiction
- Cure (Canongate Books) by Jo Marchant (UK) non-fiction
- The Tidal Zone (Granta Books) by Sarah Moss (UK) fiction
- The Gene (The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House) by Siddhartha Mukherjee (USA) non-fiction
- The Essex Serpent (Serpent's Tail, Profile Books) by Sarah Perry (UK) fiction
- A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Adam Rutherford (UK) non-fiction
- Miss Jane (Picador) by Brad Watson (USA) fiction
- I Contain Multitudes (The Bodley Head, Penguin Random House) by Ed Yong (UK) non-fiction

The shortlist for the prize will be announced at a press conference on Tuesday 14 March at the London Book Fair. The winner will be announced at an evening ceremony on Monday 24 April at Wellcome Collection.