Jonny Steinberg's THREE-LETTER PLAGUE: A Young Man's Journey Through a Great Epidemic, a vivid narrative non-fiction examining the AIDS crisis in South Africa, has been shortlisted for the first ever Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a prestigious new £25,000 award for outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine. The winner will be announced at an awards reception at Wellcome Collection in London on 4 November 2009. Jonny Steinberg will be in the UK at the end of October for events leading up to the prize announcement, and for the announcement itself.

THREE-LETTER PLAGUE received the Recht Malan Prize 2009 for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Alan Paton Award 2009 and the University of Johannesburg Prize 2008/09. The book was also a South African Sunday Times Book of the Year 2008 and a Washington Post Book of the Year 2008 in the US, where it was published by Simon & Schuster under the title SIZWE'S TEST.

Other books on the Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist include:
ILLNESS - Havi Carel (Acumen Publishing)

TORMENTED HOPE - Brian Dillon (Penguin Ireland)

KEEPER - Andrea Gillies (Short Books)

INTUITION - Allegra Goodman (Atlantic Books)

CUTTING FOR STONE - Abraham Verghese (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

To find out more, including information on an event where the public may hear from some of the shortlisted authors, please click here.

Praise for THREE-LETTER PLAGUE:
'A sensitive, moving and deeply intelligent exploration of ways in which individuals and institutions have responded to the catastrophe of AIDS in South Africa.'
-- JM Coetzee

'With his distinctive clarity of vision, Jonny Steinberg mines down to another of contemporary South Africa's fault lines and manages to pull off a remarkable literary feat - to make AIDS engaging to a largely fatigued world' 
-- Peter Godwin

See more on Jonny and his next book on Liberian immigrants in Staten Island, NY, on his Open Society Fellowship page.