Authors Like Oliver Sacks

A.R. Luria

Russian · b. 1902 · Neuropsychologist

Alexander Luria was a Soviet psychologist and neurologist, widely regarded as the founder of neuropsychology in the Soviet Union. The Mind of a Mnemonist follows a man who could not forget anything; The Man with a Shattered World is built from the journal of Zazetsky, a soldier whose brain was damaged at the Battle of Smolensk and who spent some twenty years trying to write his way back to a coherent self.

V.S. Ramachandran

Indian-American · b. 1951 · Neuroscientist

Ramachandran is a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, best known for his work on phantom limbs. Phantoms in the Brain, written with the New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee, moves through phantom limbs, the Capgras delusion, neglect after stroke and religious experience in epilepsy, one patient at a time. Sacks wrote its foreword.

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Lewis Thomas

American · b. 1913 · Essayist · National Book Award 1975

Thomas was a physician, researcher and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute who began writing short essays for The New England Journal of Medicine. The first collection, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), won National Book Awards in both Arts and Letters and the Sciences in 1975. The Youngest Science is his memoir of medicine becoming a science in his own lifetime.

Atul Gawande

American · b. 1965 · Surgeon and essayist

Gawande is a surgeon who became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1998. Complications, about error and uncertainty in surgery, was a National Book Award finalist; The Checklist Manifesto (2009) argued for simple checklists in medicine; Being Mortal is about old age, dying and what medicine owes people at the end. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2006.

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Paul Kalanithi

American · b. 1977 · Memoirist

Kalanithi was a neurosurgery resident at Stanford when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2013, at thirty-six. He died in March 2015, and When Breath Becomes Air was published in January 2016, with a foreword by Abraham Verghese and an epilogue by his widow, Lucy Kalanithi. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017.

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Henry Marsh

British · b. 1950 · Memoirist

Marsh was a senior consultant neurosurgeon at St George's Hospital in south London until 2015 and has worked with neurosurgeons in Ukraine since 1992, the subject of the documentary The English Surgeon (2007). Do No Harm is a book of cases, each chapter named after a condition, and it won the PEN Ackerley Prize. And Finally (2022) follows his own treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Indian-American · b. 1970 · Physician and writer · Pulitzer 2011

Mukherjee is an oncologist at Columbia University. The Emperor of All Maladies, a history of cancer told partly through his own patients, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2011. The Gene is a history of heredity that runs through mental illness in his own family; The Song of the Cell (2022) completes the sequence.

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Andrew Solomon

American · b. 1963 · Writer · National Book Award 2001

Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression combines his own depression with reporting and history, and won the National Book Award in 2001. Far from the Tree, built from interviews with hundreds of families whose children are deaf, autistic, schizophrenic or otherwise unlike their parents, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012.

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Susannah Cahalan

American · b. 1985 · Journalist

In 2009, at twenty-four, Cahalan, a reporter at the New York Post, developed what was eventually diagnosed as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, after a doctor asked her to draw a clock and she drew only half of it. Brain on Fire reconstructs the month she cannot remember from records and interviews. The Great Pretender investigates David Rosenhan's famous 1973 study of sane people in psychiatric hospitals and argues that he fabricated parts of it.

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Ed Yong

British · b. 1981 · Science writer · Pulitzer 2021

Yong was born in Malaysia and became a British citizen in 2005. He was a science writer at The Atlantic from 2015 to 2023 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. I Contain Multitudes is about the microbes that live in and on animals; An Immense World is about how other animals sense the world.

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