“The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” a debut book by US based Indian doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee’s has won the 2011 Pulitzer prize in general non-fiction category and also received $10,000 as prize money.
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee
The book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” gained praise and rave reviews from Times Magazine and New York Times earlier.
The Indian born Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Oncologist; he is an Assistant Professor teaching medicine at Columbia University and a Cancer Physician at the Columbia University Medical Centre. He is also an award-winning science writer.
Rhodes scholar Siddhartha Mukherjee always wanted to become doctor. He completed his schooling from Delhi’s St. Columbus School; Shah Rukh Khan was also five years senior to Dr.Mukherjee in the school. A Rhodes Scholar, he majored in biology from Stanford University and obtained his PH.D. in Immunology from Oxford University’ Dr.Siddhartha Mukherjee joined Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Emperor of All Maladies
Dr.Siddhartha Mukherjee’s articles have appeared in magazines like Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times and The New Republic.
Dr.Siddhartha Mukherjee began writing this book only after meeting a patient who had stomach cancer. One day she told Dr. Mukherjee that she would definitely go on fighting for life but told him that she needed to know what she was battling against. Dr.Mukherjee could not explain to her about cancer as there was no well-known book that wojuld explain it to a layman; so he himself took charge and started writing one in pursuit of giving answer to her query.
In its citation, the Pulitzer award committee described this book, “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”
According to the Pulitzer’s website, “From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the 19th-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukamia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive – and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.”
Dr.Siddhartha Mukherjee is married to the famous sculptor artist Sarah Sze, and is blessed with two daughters.
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