Press Release: Prizes and Awards
John O'Donoghue Wins Mind Book Of The Year 2010
Posted at 4:02PM Thursday 05 Aug 2010
Mental health charity Mind has presented author and poet John O'Donoghue with its prestigious Book of the Year Award for his unforgettable memoir Sectioned: A life interrupted (John Murray 2009), a beautifully woven account of the breakdowns which punctuated O'Dononghue's life since the age of sixteen. The announcement was made at the Mind Awards ceremony held at The Royal Institute of British Architects in central London on 8 July, hosted by BBC Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer. Following the death of his father and the onset of depression with psychosis, O'Donoghue spent more than a decade journeying between asylums, halfway houses, homeless hostels, squats and the streets, a voyage of survival which is unsentimentally recounted by the author in Sectioned: A life interrupted. Now a lecturer in creative writing at the Open University and The University of Westminster, O'Donoghue's inspiring tale is one of triumph over great adversity. Judge Blake Morrison said of Sectioned: A life interrupted: "The humdrum reality of mental illness has rarely been so well conveyed and it's less a story of locked wards than of hostels, soup kitchens, sheltered housing and relentless poverty. Poetry is part of what saved John O'Donoghue: he began to write as a teenager and through most of his ordeals he kept it up. The liquid cosh could have stunned him into silence, but against the odds he got his book written, and the result is a triumph - an honest voice speaking out loud and clear." On winning John O'Donoghue said: "I am delighted to have won the Mind Book of the Year Award and would like to thank Mind, especially Paul Farmer. Everyone speaks so highly of Mind and no one has a bad word to say about the charity, they are doing a great job and I am so pleased to have won." The annual Mind Book of the Year Award, now in its 29th year, celebrates outstanding works of fact or fiction that deepen understanding of mental health issues and forms part of the Mind Awards. Nominated alongside Sectioned: A life interrupted, published by John Murray, were Richard Bentall for Doctoring the Mind, P.J. Davy for Nutters, Michael Greenberg for Hurry Down Sunshine, Irving Kirsch for The Emperor's New Drugs, Loretta Loach for Devil's Children and Norah Vincent for Voluntary Madness. The ceremony also saw the presentation of the Journalist of the Year award, which went to doctor, author and journalist Max Pemberton for a series of articles published in The Daily Telegraph and The Evening Standard. The Champion of the Year Award was won by Rachel Perkins, psychologist and director at South West London and St George's Mental Health Trust, who takes the crown from last year's Champion Alastair Campbell. The Student Journalist prize, which recognises excellence in student media reporting, went to Jennie Agg from The University of Manchester.
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