Siddhartha Mukherjee wins Pulitzer Prize for 'biography of cancer'
Siddhartha Mukherjee (India & Magdalen 1993) has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Dr Mukherjee's book was described by the judges as 'an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who completed a DPhil in biochemistry in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, is assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center.
At least fifteen Rhodes Scholars have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes, in categories which include history, international reporting, editorial writing, poetry, general non-fiction, and biography. The first are believed to have been Bernadotte Schmitt (Tennessee & Merton 1905), winner in the history category in 1931 for The Coming of the War 1914, and Eugene Parker Chase (New Hampshire & Magdalen 1916), winner in 1934 for editorial writing.
For details of the 2011 Prize awarded to Siddhartha Mukherjee, click here.
For publisher's details of The Emperor of All Maladies, published in November 2010, click here.
For some of the extensive coverage of Siddhartha Mukherjee's prize, click here, here, here, here, and here.
For recent books by Rhodes Scholars, listed by year of publication, click here.
