Book your tickets to see 2014 winner Andrew Solomon giving the inaugural Wellcome Book Prize Lecture at Hay Festival on Sunday 24 May 2015
For the inaugural Wellcome Book Prize Lecture at this year's Hay Festival, the winner of the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize Andrew Solomon introduces his wise and compassionate book Far From the Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love.
Far from the Tree is a monumental work, a decade in the writing, about family. It tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. Drawing on interviews with over three hundred families, covering subjects including deafness, dwarfism, Down’s syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, children born of rape, children convicted of crime and transgender people, Solomon documents ordinary people making courageous choices.
The 2014 chair of judges Andrew Motion said of the book: “Solomon has already been widely praised for his depth of research, his writerly flair, and his range of address - and all these things are indeed remarkable: the book took him ten years to write, and the benefits of his patience and thoughtfulness are evident everywhere. But its greatest strength, perhaps, is to combine proper scholarly objectivity with a sense of intimate connection - and to do so in ways that allow for the creation of distinct categories and clear conclusions, while at the same time admitting contradictions and exceptions.”
The talk will be chaired by Hay Festival President Stephen Fry.