Wellcome Book Prize upped to £30k

The prize fund for the Wellcome Book Prize has been increased to £30,000.

This marks a £5,000 increase for the annual award, which goes to a title with a medical theme. The prize will now also sport the tagline "Books for the incurably curious".

Former poet laureate Andrew Motion will be the chair of the judges for next year, with Lisa Appignanesi, journalist Hadley Freeman, presenter Dr Michael Mosley, and James Runcie, head of literature at the Southbank Centre, the remaining judges.

Shortlisted titles for next year's Wellcome Book Prize will be revealed in February 2014, with the winner announced at the end of April.

The prize is backed by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation dedicated to health. It is based at the Wellcome Collection in London, which will undergo a £17.5m development in 2014, where the prize was re-launched.

Ken Arnold, head of public programmes at Wellcome Collection said: “This initiative is all about the mutual illumination that literature and medicine offer each other. 2014 will see a significant expansion in our cultural offer through a major redevelopment of Wellcome Collection, and this enhanced book prize allows us further to celebrate the role of books in Wellcome’s particular concern with the human condition.”

Wellcome Book Prize is open to both fiction and non-fiction titles which have been published in the UK during the prize year. In 2012, Thomas Wright won with non-fiction book Circulation (Chatto & Windus).