Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee’s acclaimed book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category.
According to the Pulitzer citation, the book by the New York-based cancer physician and researcher is “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science“.
It is a profoundly humane “biography” of cancer — from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.
