World's largest health science fiction prize awarded

Congratulations to winner Elisabeth Ingram Wallace for her entry, OPSNIZING DAD.

Writing the Future Competition won by Elisabeth Ingram Wallace for her entry, OPSNIZING DAD, an exploration of the preservation of human memories.

The £10,000 Writing the Future competition asked authors to imagine how health and healthcare might look in 2100. Kaleidoscope Health & Care initiated the Writing the Future project to spark new conversations and radical thinking about the long-term future of health and healthcare. 

The competition, which was supported by The Commonwealth Fund, the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and The House of St Barnabas attracted more than 140 short stories covering themes including genomics, technology, ethics, and the impact of medical advances on families and society at large. 

Richard Taunt, founder of Kaleidoscope, said: 

“Congratulations to Elisabeth for her outstanding story, emerging victorious out of a ridiculously high quality field. We are in awe of Elisabeth’s talents, and of the 140 others who entered the competition. We hope the stories excite, inspire and even scare you, but above all, make you think differently about health and healthcare of the far tomorrow, and what it’s there for today.” 

Competition judge Don Goldmann, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, said of the winning story: 

"Opsnizing Dad draws you into the warm, fuzzy, sentimental appeal of high fidelity preservation of the memories of loved ones. Why not – perhaps in VR! Our dads, our great grandparents from the 'old country', ourselves and our 'legacy' brighter and clearer than they were in their original real life version." 

Another of the judges, Lydia Nicholas of Nesta, said: 

"Exploring the themes and ideas in the shortlisted entries has been fascinating; many worries and hopes were repeated but always expressed in original, often moving or funny ways. This has been both an interesting insight into popular understanding of health futures and a reflection of the participants' individual talents." 

The other short-listed authors were: Matthew Castle, Hannah Harper, Andrew Dana Hudson, Ida Keogh and Matthew Warren. 

Read all the shortlisted stories here.

Judges 

The judges were: 

• Richard Smith, writer, editor of the British Medical Journal 1991–2004, and former CEO of United Healthcare Europe 
• Jo Bibby, Non-executive Director at Salford Royal Trust NHS 2013-2017, Director of Strategy at the Health Foundation 
• Don Goldmann, MD, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement 
• Anne Perkins, Lead writer, lobby correspondent and feature writer for the Guardian since 1997 
• Christopher Reason, core write on Eastenders since 1993, and writer for numerous health dramas 
• Lydia Nicholas, senior researcher at Nesta, focusing on health, big data and artificial intelligence in public services