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Award Winning Books About Medicine and Illness

93 books from 19 lists, 1924 to 2025

Medicine gives writers a subject where the stakes need no explaining, which is why the books here win prizes in every category. Histories of disease sit with novels about doctors and memoirs of being ill, and the epidemics turn up often enough to read as a running theme of the last century.

Books by prize

One shelf per list, newest first on each. The prize name opens its full list.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

2025 New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe
2022 frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
2020 The Tradition by Jericho Brown
2018 Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart
2010 Versed by Rae Armantrout
2004 Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright
1991 Near Changes by Mona Van Duyn
1982 The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
1967 Live or Die by Anne Sexton

Royal Society Science Book Prize

2025 Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain
2018 Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
2007 Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
1996 Plague's Progress by Arno Karlen
1995 The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide by John Emsley
1993 The Making of Memory by Steven Rose
1988 Living with Risk by British Medical Association Board of Science

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

2025 Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
2022 The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine
2010 War Dances by Sherman Alexie
2007 Everyman by Philip Roth
1983 Seaview by Toby Olson

Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker

2025 The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
2019 The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
2015 A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
2005 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
1996 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
1993 Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
1963 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
1934 Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1924 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Women's Prize for Fiction

2024 Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
2020 Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
2014 A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

2024 Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
2023 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1991 Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Nobel Prize in Literature

2024 The Vegetarian by Han Kang
2015 Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
2004 The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
2000 Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
1998 Blindness by José Saramago
1994 A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe
1936 Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill
1929 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

2021 Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
2017 How to Survive a Plague by David France
2015 NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman

Newbery Medal

2021 When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller
2019 Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina
2005 Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

The Booker Prize

2020 Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
2005 The Sea by John Banville
2004 The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
1995 The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
1970 The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

Pulitzer Prize for Biography

2020 Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
1992 Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller Jr. by Lewis B. Puller Jr.
1985 The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman
1978 Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate
1974 O'Neill, Son and Artist by Louis Sheaffer
1964 John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate
1926 The Life of Sir William Osler by Harvey Cushing

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction

2020 The Undying by Anne Boyer
2014 Toms River by Dan Fagin
2011 The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
1997 Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger
1984 The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr
1983 Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan
1976 Why Survive? Being Old in America by Robert N. Butler
1974 The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Nebula Award for Best Novel

2019 A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
2003 The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
2000 Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
1989 The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
1966 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel

2015 A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
2012 The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Pulitzer Prize for History

2015 Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn
2006 Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky
1991 A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

National Book Award for Fiction

2006 The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
1996 Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett
1975 The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams
1950 The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

National Book Award for Non-Fiction

2001 The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
1994 How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland

Hugo Award for Best Novel

1993 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
1979 Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

Edgar Award for Best Novel

1969 A Case of Need by Michael Crichton

Other subjects

Science Fiction and Fantasy, Mystery and Crime, Horror, Poetry, Children's Books, History, Biography and Memoir, Science and Nature, War, Race and Civil Rights, Immigration and Exile, Politics and Power and Coming of Age. Or see all 14 subjects, browse by prize or browse by year.