Rhodes scholar and cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee became the fourth Indian-American to win the prestigious Pulitzer award for his book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. Writer Jhumpa Lahiri, journalists Gobind Behari Lal (1937) and Geeta Anand (2003) were the previous winners.

Forty-one-year-old Mukherjee’s best-selling book recounts the history of the disease and how doctors and patients are fighting the war against it. The Pulitzer award citation described the book as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite

treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science”. The critically-acclaimed book has been described as a “literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist”.

Mukherjee, who was born in Delhi, graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School, and now lives in New York with his sculptor wife Sarah Sze and daughters Leela and Arya. Mukherjee’s honour carries an award of $10,000.