Dr. Abraham Verghese is the 2014 recipient of the Heinz Foundation’s Arts and Humanities Award, an honor he shares with 18 other Americans since 1993. (El Paso Newspaper Tree/Robert Ravindran)
Tadias Magazine
News Update
Monday, March 17th, 2014
New York (TADIAS) — Abraham Verghese, a Stanford professor of medicine and the best-selling author of Cutting for Stone, an epic novel set in his birth country of Ethiopia, has won the $250,000 Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. The Heinz Family Foundation noted that “Dr. Abraham Verghese brings a unique perspective to healing as an art and a calling in an era when the scientific details of medicine often overshadow the humanity of the patient.”
“I was at home and I heard that Teresa Heinz wanted to speak to me,” Verghese told the El Paso Newspaper Tree. “I knew that she was Senator Kerry’s wife and the widow of Senator John Heinz. I had also read that she grew up in Africa and her father was a physician; I assumed that she was perhaps putting some event together and wanted me to speak. When the phone call came, it was truly a surprise at every level.”
Dr. Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and the Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Verghese has written two books – My Own Country (a memoir) and Cutting for Stone. His writings have also been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Related:
Tadias Interview with Dr. Abraham Verghese (2009)
Tadias Book Review: Verghese’s ‘Cutting for Stone’
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