There are many ways to get sick, many ways to crumble and crash. I work as a physician in a big inner-city hospital overflowing with the sick. The orthopaedic ward is full of people who got up for a glass of water and snapped their hip. The psychiatry ward’s full of near suicides and phantom voices drilling holes in people’s heads. The cardiac cath lab’s overflowing with heart attacks. The burns unit usually has one or two people who tipped a bucket of petrol over their head and struck a match. We house the frail and the elderly, the drunken and the overdosed. Hearts and lungs are plucked from the brain-dead and sewn into the diseased; people crowd the emergency department, suffering because their organs are slowly failing the body that shelters them. What made them sick? What is health? What is it that we do to people in a hospital?

Laurinda by Alice Pung has won the Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult’s Literature at the 2016 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Nona and Me by Clare Atkins has been shortlisted for the 2016 YABBA Awards.

Black Inc. congratulates Stuart Kells, whose book Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution has won the 2015 Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

Explore the dos-and-don’ts of writing fiction in conversation with Micheline Lee about her newly released debut, The Healing Party. Supported by the Write-ability program.