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Costa Award-winning author Christie Watson, who worked a registered nurse for 20 years before her writing career, has been appointed professor of medical and health humanities at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Watson's role will include engagement with disciplines from medicine and ethics to creative writing and drama, nursing, paramedic science, anthropology and history.
Watson is the author of bestseller The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story (Chatto), which has been translated into 23 languages and is currently being adapted for theatre and television. Her second non-fiction book, The Courage to Care: A Call for Compassion (Chatto), is out this September.
Her debut novel, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away (Quercus), won the Costa First Novel Award in 2011, and her second, Where Women Are Kings (Quercus), was published in 2013.
Professor Fiona Lettice, UEA’s pro-vice chancellor for research and innovation, said the university was "delighted" to welcome Watson to UEA, "particularly as we further develop our cross-faculty medical and health humanities research and teaching activities. Christie’s experience as a nurse and author will be key to enabling exciting new interdisciplinary opportunities and initiatives across UEA and with our external partners."
After starting in the post last week, Watson's remit is to "work closely with both the Faculties of Arts and Humanities, and Medicine and Health Sciences, to ensure an integrated development of medical and health humanities in terms of creative research, public engagement, teaching and curriculum development".
Watson said she was "very much looking forward to further developing this vital discipline at UEA," citing that incorporating humanities into healthcare training has been shown to enhance skills of empathy and teamwork, and contribute to positive mental health. "The search for meaning during this profound time has only just begun and medical and health humanities have never been more important," she said.
The appointment comes as UEA is about to begin the celebration of its Creative Writing degree course, the first in the UK when it began 50 years ago. A raft of initiatives and public programming will kick off in October.
After training and working at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Watson worked as a nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, in a career that spanned more than two decades. She was awarded the Malcolm Bradbury Bursary to take the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, later taught creative writing at various institutions, and returned to nursing work in the NHS during the first peak of the coronavirus pandemic.