Reading at Hippocrates Awards by Karen McCarthy Woolf from 'An Aviary of Small Birds'

Karen McCarthy Woolf read from her first collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, at the Poetry and Medicine Symposium held to mark the announcement of the 2015 Hippocrate Prize winners. 

Listen to Karen McCarthy Woolf reading from 'An Aviary of Small Birds' 



She is the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Prize and an Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral scholarship at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is researching new ways of writing about nature in the face of climate change. 


Her first collection An Aviary of Small Birds, a book of elegiac poems that commemorate a baby son who died in childbirth, is an exploration of grief and loss and testament to the power of poetry as a transformative art. A Poetry Book Society recommendation and Guardian/Observer Book of the Month (see Guardian/Observer review by Kate Kellaway) it is published by Oxford Carcanet.

The Hippocrates Prize is an annual award with a closing date of 31st January 2016 for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize. 

See more about entering for the 2016 Hippocrates Prize.

With a 1st prize of £5000 for the winning poem in the Open International category of

Karen McCarthy Woolf

£5,000, £5000 for the 1st Prize in the NHS category, and £500 for the Young Poets Award the Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single poem. In its first 5 years, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 6000 entries from 61 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and Finland to Australasia.