Female-dominated Wellcome book prize shortlist spans Victorian surgery and modern Nigeria

Lindsey Fitzharris, shortlisted for The Butchering Art, pictured at the Old Operating Theatre Museum in London. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

A reflection on death from a palliative care consultant sits alongside a Nigerian novel tackling the heartbreak of infertility on the female-dominated Wellcome book prize shortlist.

Chair of judges Edmund de Waal praised the six contenders for the £30,000 award for adding to public discussion about what it means to be human. The panel of judges, he said, were looking for “books that start debates or deepen them, that move us profoundly, surprise and delight and perplex us, that bring the worlds of medicine and health into urgent public conversation”.

In Kathryn Mannix’s shortlisted With the End in Mind, the consultant combines patients’ stories about the ends of their lives with her own argument for approaching death. In Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay With Me, the only novel on the shortlist, the protagonist Yejide struggles with infertility and then sickle cell disease, a blood condition of which Nigeria has the highest rate in the world.

De Waal pointed to an “extraordinary” shift over the last five years in public engagement with books about medicine and medical issues. “The public appetite for books which have a grounding in science, or have some kind of conversation with mortality or vitality, seems to be just beginning. There’s an extraordinary velocity about how this kind of publishing is working. And it’s building,” he said. “It’s encouraged publishers to take risks on writers who they wouldn’t necessarily have previously thought would have the capacity to be mainstream. On our shortlist, there are a lot of new writers who are writing books that wouldn’t necessarily have reached this kind of public before.”

Mannix and Adébáyọ̀ are two of four debut authors on the shortlist. First-time writer Lindsey Fitzharris was picked for The Butchering Art, her history of the Victorian surgeon Joseph Lister, while Mark O’Connell, the only male writer in the lineup, was chosen for To Be a Machine, an exploration of the transhumanism movement and the use of technology to extend life.

Also on the list are Sigrid Rausing’s memoir Mayhem, about the impact of drug addiction on her family, and Meredith Wadman’s history of the rubella vaccine breakthrough, The Vaccine Race.

De Waal said: “You never want things of such importance to be owned entirely by experts. Books to do with genetics, with end of life, with addiction, with infertility – all these are things which all of us at some point deal with, so to bring them, with vigour and insight and passion, into conversation with us through literature, is extraordinary. Not only do we become informed, but we become passionate about it. We take things on. And if we take things on with that kind of knowledge and vigour, then that can only be good for public understanding of science, which is the mission of this incredible prize.”

Previous winners include Marion Coutts for The Iceberg, her memoir of her husband’s death; Andrea Gillies for Keeper, an exploration of Alzheimer’s; and Alice La Plante’s novel, Turn of Mind. This year’s winner will be revealed on 30 April.