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Adam Kay has been shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2017 for his junior doctor diaries, This Is Going to Hurt (Picador), alongside authors Thomas Dilworth, Edmund Gordon, Gareth Russell, Helen Smith and James Stourton.
Kay's book chronicles life at the coalface of the NHS drawing on his experience as a junior doctor between 2004 and 2010, before he became a comedian. It won him the BAMB Reader's Choice Award and a shortlisting for The British Book Awards' Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year, while Sister Pictures snapped up the television rights to the debut in a 12-way auction. His sell-out show at the Edinburgh Festival and Soho Theatre were also based on the book.
The subjects of the other titles shortlisted are: the Modernist poet-artist David Jones, in Dilworth's biography David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (Jonathan Cape); writer and critic Angela Carter in Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Chatto & Windus); Henry VIII’s fifth wife in Russell's Young & Damned & Fair: The Life & Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII (William Collins); writer and editor Edward Garnett in Smith's The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett (Jonathan Cape); and broadcaster and writer Kenneth Clark in Stourton's Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation (William Collins).
Last year, Hisham Matar won the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2016 for The Return (Viking).
This year the £2,500 prize will be judged by biographer Caroline Moorehead, actor Ian Kelly and the literary editor of The Spectator, Sam Leith.
It will be awarded on 6th March 2018 at a drinks reception hosted at The Library Club, St Martin’s Lane.