Information On Cancer

Information On Cancer Biography

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Siddhartha Mukherjee
Guardian First Book award winner Siddhartha Mukherjee. Photograph: Deborah Feingold/AP

An oncologist has won the Guardian First Book award for his "biography" of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which traces the disease from the first recorded mastectomy in 500BC to today's cutting edge research.

Siddhartha Mukherjee has called his book – a mix of history, memoir and biography, of science and the personal stories of cancer patients – "an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behaviour".

The only non-fiction title on the shortlist, it beat four novels to win the £10,000 award, narrowly seeing off Amy Waldman's The Submission, set in post-9/11 America. Stephen Kelman's Booker-shortlisted novel Pigeon English was also in the running.

The chair of judges, Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review, said Mukherjee's "anthropomorphism of a disease" was a "remarkable and unusual achievement".

"In the end it came down to a very difficult decision between a first novel [The Submission] and a first book of tremendous research," she said. "They were so different – both incredibly impressive achievements in their own rights, but in the end the Mukherjee was felt to be the more original.

"He has managed to balance such a vast amount of information with lively narratives, combining complicated science with moving human stories. Far from being intimidating, it's a compelling, accessible book, packed full of facts and anecdotes that you know you will remember and which you immediately want to pass on to someone else."

Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, embarked on the book in 2004, when a sarcoma patient asked him to explain what she was fighting.

"Patients would come up and ask: 'What is the story?' They were looking for a much deeper story, not their own particular medical history, but the larger context – what the origins of the disease were, and what would happen next. What the future was," he said. "It's a question I find particularly haunting. It seems to me as a scientist that we can only understand the future by understanding the past."

He began writing a journal in answer to his patients' questions, but by 2005 it had become obvious it could not be a small journal, that for the question of origin to be answered he "had to go back to the real origin rather than cutting it off at an arbitrary point. It became bigger and bigger until it reached its current form."

Sending it out to publishers, he received two types of response: either they said that no one would want to read about cancer or they got it immediately. "There was no grey area," he said.

Greeted with rave reviews when it was published, The Emperor of Maladies has already picked up a Pulitzer prize, with judges for the prestigious American award calling it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science".

Author and academic Sarah Churchwell – who joined Allardice on the judging panel for the Guardian award along with the authors David Nicholls and Antonia Fraser, Stuart Broom of Waterstone's and the Guardian's deputy editor Katharine Viner – said Mukherjee had "marshalled an immense amount of material into a readable and inspiring story" and that the result is "a gripping, enlightening read about the nature of illness and our battle against what begins to look like mortality itself".

Mukherjee, who is writing a second book, said it was "a great and distinct honour" to win the Guardian prize. "You never write books to win awards – they are immensely gratifying but unexpected," he said. "In recognising The Emperor of All Maladies, the judges have also recognised the extraordinary courage and resilience of the men and women who struggle with illness, and the men and women who struggle to treat illnesses.

"I am delighted and honoured to join a formidable list of writers and scholars – Zadie Smith, Alexandra Harris, Petina Gappah, and Alex Ross among them."