Polly Morland And Rachel Clarke On A Fortunate Woman

In July, 5x15 is thrilled to welcome the highly acclaimed and best-selling authors Polly Morland and Rachel Clarke, for a vital conversation about medicine, the NHS and the fascinating story behind Morland's new book A FORTUNATE WOMAN: A Country Doctor's Story, a Sunday Times bestseller that was shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Polly Morland was clearing her late mother’s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see reproduced in it an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives. The book was A Fortunate Man, John Berger’s classic 1967 account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager.

A Fortunate Woman tells her compelling story, and how the tale of the old doctor has threaded through her own life in magical ways. Working within a community she loves, she is a rarity in contemporary medicine: a modern doctor who knows her patients inside out, the lives of this ancient, wild place entwined with her own.

Praise for Polly Morland and A FORTUNATE WOMAN

'I was consoled & compelled by this book’s steady gaze on healing & caring. The writing is beautiful.' - SARAH MOSS

'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape.' - KATHLEEN JAMIE, New Statesman

'The best book I’ve read about general practice for a long time. Astonishingly perceptive, it shows how a committed GP can keep human values alive in an increasingly impersonal NHS – and why we urgently need more like her.' - ROGER NEIGHBOUR, Past President, Royal College of General Practitioners

Polly Morland is a writer and documentary maker. She worked for fifteen years in television, producing and directing documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery. She is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in the School of Journalism, Media & Culture at Cardiff University. She is the author of several books, including The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How to Be Brave, which won the Guardian First Book Award and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. A Fortunate Woman was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2022.

Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a television journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible - and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change. Rachel is the author of three Sunday Times bestselling books. Breathtaking reveals what life was really like inside the NHS during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. Dear Life, shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize, is based on her work in a hospice. It explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life. Your Life in My Hands documents life as a junior doctor on the NHS frontline.

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