A transgender boxer’s memoir and Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation are among the six titles vying for the £30,000 prize
From a memoir by the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden to a novel inspired by the life of Alan Turing, the exploration of gender is a key theme on the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome book prize.
The £30,000 award is open to fiction and non-fiction, and aims to celebrate a book that best illuminates “the many ways that health, medicine and illness touch our lives”. The six books shortlisted this year include transgender boxer Thomas Page McBee’s memoir Amateur, an exploration of gender and masculinity that judges said “challenges and confounds some of our most ingrained prejudices”, and Will Eaves’s novel Murmur, which fictionalises the period of Alan Turing’s life when the mathematician was undergoing chemical castration, before he killed himself. The chair of judges, novelist Elif Shafak, said it would “grip your mind in the very first pages, break your heart halfway through, and in the end, strangely, unexpectedly, restore your faith in human beings and their endless capacity for resilience”.
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