New title for Profile and Wellcome collaboration

Profile Books will publish the new book by Costa Book Award shortlisted author Gavin Francis in partnership with Wellcome Collection.

World rights were acquired in all languages from Jenny Brown at Jenny Brown Associates.

The book, titled Adventures in Human Being, is described as a "meditation on the human body and the human condition".

Francis’ previous book Empire Antarctica (Vintage) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and won the Scottish Book Award 2013. It was also shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award.

Kirty Topiwala, commissioning editor at Wellcome Collection, commented: “Gavin is an exceptional writer, with an enquiring, lyrical and profoundly humane approach to his subject matter. He makes poetry of medicine. After reading this magnificent book, you will never think of your body in the same way again."

Andrew Franklin, m.d. of Profile Books, said Francis was “a brilliant and talented writer, and added: “Comissioning him to write about the body – a subject close to all our hearts – was a no-brainer.”

Francis, who qualified from medical school before his writing career, said: “Medicine immerses me in the difficulties and wonders inherent in human lives, while my writing tries to reflect on and articulate the possibilities of those lives."

Profile Books and Wellcome Trust will be publishing the first book in their collaborative publishing partnership, Forensics: An Anatomy of Crime by Val MacDermid, in August 2014.

Adventures in Human Being will be published in spring 2015.