Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese is an internationally acclaimed author who has written a number of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and books on medicine. He is an Ethiopian-born American academic physician and professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a prolific and award-winning writer, who has become widely known for works such as 'My Own Country', his novel 'Cutting for Stone', and 'The Tennis Partner', a memoir about his work as a doctor.

Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1955 to an Indian father and a Syrian mother. His parents moved the family to Tennessee, U.S., when he was fourteen. In the United States, he attended a local high school, and then received an undergraduate degree in English, followed by an MD at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He then completed an internship as an internal medicine physician at the University of Arkansas, followed by a residency and fellowship at the University of Iowa.

Verghese’s medical and literary career ran in parallel throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As a physician, he worked in family and hospital medicine, residency training, and research. In 1993, he published the widely acclaimed 'My Own Country', which documented his experience of working with AIDS patients in eastern Tennessee before the development of effective treatments for the disease.

Verghese’s next major work, 'Cutting for Stone' (2009), is the story of twin brothers born to a Sister of Charity in Ethiopia. It earned him rave reviews, won a number of awards, and appeared on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list. In 2010, he followed that success with 'The Tennis Partner', a memoir of his friendship with a young doctor at a hospital in El Paso, Texas. The book was praised for its frank, intimate exploration of medicine and medicine as a form of caring and understanding.

Since then, Verghese has written three additional books, 'The Bishop's Voice', 'The Loft Poet' and 'My Life as a Nightingale', each of which has earned critical acclaim and won numerous awards. 'My Life as a Nightingale' was the winner of the 2020 Pen/Jean Stein Award for Nonfiction.

Verghese has also been awarded a number of honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and a National Humanities Medal. He is also a prolific and prolific lecturer and teacher, who has presented on a variety of topics ranging from medical ethics to contemporary literature and medicine.

It is this combination of medical and literary expertise that makes Verghese so unique. His depth of knowledge allows him to write in a manner which is both empathetic and insightful, drawing on his own experiences as a doctor, his knowledge of language, and his broad understanding of the human experience. It is this combination which makes his work so compelling, and has earned him recognition the world over.