Help us curate a bookshelf for the NHS

This summer, we’ll be helping to celebrate the 75th year of the NHS with the Untold Stories of the NHS project.

As part of its celebration of NHS75, the project is curating a virtual bookshelf of ten poetry books that we would like to see in NHS libraries. We want the collection to be a resource that NHS librarians can guide staff and patients to as a support for health and wellbeing, and even an inspiration for their own creative writing.

There might be various reasons for a particular choice, a couple of examples could be:

• The book might deal directly with the kinds of heightened and challenging experiences people working in or visiting a hospital might encounter, such as grief, illness or workplace stress.
• The book might have been written by a poet with experience of working in health and social care, and thereby speak directly to the working lives of NHS staff.

We’re asking writers and NHS professionals to nominate a book and tell us why they’ve chosen it, and we’re keen to hear from you. The virtual bookshelf will be published on the project website (come back soon for more information when this has launched), and we’ll buy the books for NHS libraries within Untold Stories partner Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.

If you have a book you’d like to suggest, comment on our Instagram or Twitter posts, or send an email to poetrylibrary@mmu.ac.uk. We look forward to hearing from you!