Mukherjee ‘delighted’ to be top 100 list

Indian American Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee is “delighted” that his book on cancer has been listed 75th among Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books with President Barack Obama’s autobiography in the third place.

The Delhi-born cancer specialist’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer that made it to the Time magazine’s top 10 non-fiction books of 2010 and The New York Times’ top five list, figures fourth in the science section.

“I am delighted,” Mukherjee, 41, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, who won the Pulizer in April, told IANS over the phone from New York where he practices.

Asked what he was writing now he said, “It’s still in the works” and “It’s too early to tell” what it’s about.

Mukherjee, who had his schooling at New Delhi’s St. Columba’s School, where he was five years junior to Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, said then he began writing the book to explain what’s cancer to a patient who told him she was willing to go on fighting but she needed to know what she was battling.

In choosing “the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME … magazine,” the influential weekly notes Mukherjee’s first book “is also one of the best-written, most accessible, most relevant science books ever penned.”

Full report here Hindustan Times

'A good writer stays true to self'

Author Ashwin Sanghi talks about his favourite literature and on what keeps him grounded

Page turner : The last book I read was Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by New York-based oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

Life lessons : I believe that the day one stops being spiritual, one ends up being religious. I live by the adage that the only certainty in life is death. We should, therefore, learn to live for the day and be content.

Writer's formula : Admiration from my readers inspire me and the only 'formula' I believe in towards making a good writer is: 'to thine own self be true!' I remember how a man once got in touch with me to tell me that he was so engrossed in my book that he had to take a day off from work just so that he could finish reading it. Such kind of responses from my readers is extremely endearing and it keeps me going.

Full report here Times of India 

Siddhartha Mukherjee bags Pulitzer Prize

Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee has bagged this year’s Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Delhi-born Mukherjee’s book has been described as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”.

The finalists in the category were The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain by Nicholas Carr and Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne.

An assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center, Mukherjee had told IANS in December last year: “Cancer is growing dramatically in certain parts of South Asia.”

Mukherjee advocated a strong anti-smoking campaign and breast cancer screening to battle the growing incidence of the disease in India.

Full report here Hindustan Times