November 15, 2010 Rebecca Skloot’s debut work of nonfiction has won the Wellcome Trust book prize for the best work of fiction or nonfiction with a medical theme. The award carries a prize of £25,000 (about $40,000).
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, became a huge bestseller by telling the story of a Maryland sharecropper’s daughter whose cells were crucial in research that led to some of the twentieth century’s most important medical breakthroughs. Read Chapter 16‘s review of the book here and a new Q&A with Skloot here.
