Announcing the Wellcome Collection Non-Fiction Awards Judges

Published Date: 24/09/2024

Spread the Word is excited to reveal the judges for the Wellcome Collection Non-Fiction Awards. Following a successful pilot in 2022, the first year of this programme will run from March 2025 to November 2025 for 6 non-fiction writers working on a project about health and being human.

Applications are open from 1 October to 11 November 2024. Wellcome Collection’s Fran Barrie and Spread the Word’s Bobby Nayyar are running a free online seminar on 8 October at 7pm for potential applicants.

The judges are Angela Saini and Daisy Lafarge.

Angela Saini is a journalist and author based in New York. She teaches science writing at MIT and is a Moynihan Public Scholar at CCNY. Her work appears regularly in National Geographic, Science and Foreign Policy. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Sciencewas a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and her latest, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford.

Angela says: “I’m delighted to be supporting Spread the Word for another year, this time as a judge. It’s vitally important to get voices from the margins into the mainstream, and I’m beyond excited to read the work of this year’s cohort.”

Daisy Lafarge is the author of a novel, Paul (Granta 2021), which won a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and a poetry collection, Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lovebug, a short book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula Press in 2023.

Daisy says: “I’m looking forward to discovering writing that is exploratory, unexpected and compelling. There can be so many barriers to getting published, and I’m thrilled to be part of an initiative that exists to demystify the process and support writers who might not otherwise access the encouragement and resources they need.”

Applications will be open from midday on Tuesday 1 October and close at 5pm on Monday 11 November. The Wellcome Collection Non-Fiction Awards application pack, which includes Eligibility Criteria, Terms & Conditions and FAQs will be available online from 30 September 2024 in text, BSL video, audio and inclusive read formats.

Visit the project page for more details.

Published: 24 September 2024