New Delhi-born cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category for his acclaimed book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Dr Mukherjee, 40, who will receive $10,000 in prize money, is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
The Pulitzer award citation described The Emperor of All Maladies 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 two other books on the shortlist 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.
Dr Mukherjee’s parents, who live in New Delhi, told this newspaper that they are completely overwhelmed by the news of their son winning such a prestigious prize. His mother Chandana said she expected her son to do “this well, but we were not expecting it this soon.”
Giving her son’s educational background, Mrs Mukherjee said he had finished his schooling at St. Columba’s School in New Delhi and went to Stanford University in the United States for undergraduate studies. He then went to the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and finished his doctorate there. He later went to Harvard Medical School.
Dr Mukherjee called his parents in the middle of the night (Monday-Tuesday) “My son and his wife have two little children, so I was a bit taken aback by a call at 1 am in the night,” Mrs Mukherjee said. “I asked him if everything was fine, and he told me that he had some good news,” she said.
Dr Mukherjee is married to a sculptor, Sarah Sze, and they have two daughters, five-year-old Leela and one-year-old Arya.
“I questioned him three to four times after he told me that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. I just couln’t believe it. We were so thrilled and became emotional,” she said, describing the moment she heard the news from her son.
Dr Mukherjee’s parents said they will visit him in June as they had already planned their annual visit earlier. Dr Mukherjee and his wife and two daughters will visit India in November, his mother said.
“He was in India in January as he had been invited by the Jaipur Literature Festival, but he came alone at the time,” she said.
Mrs Mukherjee said she hadn’t had time to call her son on Tuesday, and does not know how he and his family are celebrating. “Today he is very busy with the press conferences and everything... He asked me not to call as his phone will mostly be switched off. He said he would give me a call as soon as he had some time to himself.”
The flood of journalists and congratulatory phone calls has meant that Dr Mukherjee’s parents haven’t managed to go out for a celebration. “The phone is ringing constantly and the house has been flooded with journalists, so we haven’t had time to go out,” Mrs Mukherjee said, adding that the happiness for her son was celebration enough.
The Pulitzer Prize is awarded to Americans for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. The prize is administered by Columbia University in New York City.
Dr Mukherjee is the fourth person of Indian origin to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Indian-origin journalist Geeta Anand was among the staff of the Wall Street Journal to be awarded a Pulitzer in 2003 for explanatory reporting; Indian-origin author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for fiction for her book Interpreters of Maladies in 2000; and Indian-origin journalist Gobind Behari Lal had won the prestigious prize for reporting in 1937.
The book’s publisher in India described it as an “engaging” book. “Siddhartha Mukherjee has produced a real tour de force, with The Emperor of All Maladies. It is a wonderfully warm, erudite and engaging book. A panoramic history of the disease of cancer and its treatment that is infused with meticulous detail and clarity, it is a heartfelt book, but not sentimental. For a non-fiction work on cancer to hold and engross the reader from start to finish: a superlative achievement! The Pulitzer is well deserved,” HarperCollins India chief executive P.M. Sukumar said on Tuesday.