India-born Oncologist, Siddhartha Mukherjee won Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction Book about Cancer

Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, a New Delhi-born oncologist was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer on 18 April 2011. Mukherjee who currently is based in New York won the prestigious literary award for general non-fiction a decade after another Indian Jhumpa Lahiri won the prestigious award.

The Pulitzer committee described Mukherjee’s book as an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.

Siddhartha Mukherjee born 1970 is an Indian-born Bengali American doctor and non-fiction writer. Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer in 2010. The book provides a detailed account of the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy. The Oprah magazine listed the book in its Top 10 Books of 2010. The book was also listed in The 10 Best Books of 2010 by The New York Times and the Top 10 Nonfiction Books by Time magazine. In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In 2011, Time magazine nominated Dr Mukherjee in its 100 most influential people list.

Mukherjee joined the list of significant Indian writers like Abraham Verghese, who began his writing career in the late 1980s with My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story centred on AIDS in the US, Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, and Dr Deepak Chopra, the new age spiritual guru.

There are other Indians blessed with literary genes who in the past have won significant literary awards like:

Gobind Behari Lal, Science editor of San Francisco Examiner won prize in 1937 for coverage of science at Harvard University tercentenary.

Jhumpa Lahiri who won for her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies in 2000.

Geeta Anand was awarded Pulitzer in 2003 for work on Pompe Disease, a muscular condition.