Skip to main content
What types of page to search?

Popular pages: Undergraduate Postgraduate PhD Accommodation Research International students

Alternatively use our A-Z index.

Student Doctor scores first prize in short story competition

Published on

student stands cross armed in front of posters with The Great Read written on them
Student Doctor and Great Read Winner Sammy Ali

Year Two Student Doctor Sammy Ali celebrated his win in the University of Liverpool’s Great Read campaign with an appearance at this year’s Literary Festival alongside School Alumnus Dr Amir Khan.

Sammy took first place in the Undergraduate category for his thought-provoking piece, A Cadaver's Guide to Referenda. His work is now published in the Changing Natures e-book, along with stories from other University students and staff as well as famous authors, all part of the Great Read (link), a shared reading campaign to help build a sense of community at the start of the academic year.

Sammy was an esteemed guest at Liverpool Literary Festival (link) which made an impressive in-person comeback at the Victoria Gallery Museum this October with an eclectic line up of authors, poets and personalities. There, Sammy met up with Sunday Times Bestselling author and Liverpool School of Medicine Class of 2004, Dr Amir Khan who read extracts from the Great Read as part of his appearance.

Sammy tells us more about what inspired him to enter, the questions he wanted to challenge his readers with, and the importance of challenging yourself creatively.

“Changing Natures is always a relevant theme, but the past year or two especially have shown us all how temporary things can be. Being hunkered down alone in a flat for a good chunk of the pandemic was by no means pleasant, but it was definitely a pressure cooker for creativity.

My story is about a fictional body donor whose corpse reanimates after being ‘cadaverified’, and who may lose his autonomy due to his new status as a donation rather than a person. And of course, in the most British of ways, his fate is to be decided by a referendum.

I'd say one of my biggest inspirations was the privilege (and absolute insanity) of working with dead bodies in the Human Anatomy Resource Centre (HARC). I think that might be obvious to anyone who's had an anatomy class there - the descriptions of the Cadaver and its journey to the lab are taken directly from my experiences in anatomy class, and I'd like to thank the whole HARC team and Craig Humphries especially for taking the time to talk me through the donation process!

The biggest question at stake is a sickeningly simple one - 'Would you doom one person to save all of humanity?'

Note that I didn't use the word 'kill', either - that makes things way too easy. The reader gets two choices - either allow age and disease to ravish billions of people for who knows how many millennia to come or plunge one person into unimaginable agony. Forever.

I think it's a good metaphor for some real-life political choices. For example, people seem to think that restricting someone's access to healthcare in the present will only affect them in the now, but certain restrictions will undoubtedly change lives forever. And will almost definitely ripple down into future generations.

A workshop I reluctantly attended back at college defined politics as 'deciding who gets what, and how much'. I found it fascinating how such a simple formula has formed the basis for every complex debate and conflict in human history and tried my best to create a morally grey trolley problem that would leave readers with a pit in their stomach (in a good way, of course!)

I also found that not using the Cadaver's real name once he'd died also muddied the waters a bit. Does that dehumanisation make the decision to remove his rights easier? The concept opens up so many more questions.

What if the Cadaver could cure neurodegenerative illnesses? Or mental illnesses? What if the Cadaver was a bad person? Would that justify removing his rights?

Do you own your corpse once you're gone? What if you decide to come back? And what about religion? Does the Cadaver remember what he saw when he died? Did he see God? Or was it just black? What does that mean for the rest of us? Are there some things we shouldn't try to cure? And why did the chancellors put my short story in an anthology next to George Orwell's when I put a penis joke in it?!

When I found out I had won, honestly, I'm so used to rejection emails that I read the word 'congratulations' as 'commiserations'. It took a good minute or two to register what had just happened. And to anyone who thinks that I'm overreacting, remember that the prize money for first place was £500. That's a lot of Freddos!

I was alone in the same flat where I'd written the story when I got the email. I think it was more bizarre than anything because I wrote the story the night before the deadline on about 2 hours sleep - just goes to show that deadlines aren’t to be feared and you can blag it in the end if creativity strikes!

Everyone at the Great Read has been amazing and it was such a privilege to be invited along to the festival and to talks by some great writers, including Dr Amir Khan of Lorraine fame!

Pamela McGee, Sara Majeed, Professor Dinah Birch, Professor Greg Lynall, and my editor Dr Solnick were all brilliant to work with and I’d like to thank them very much for choosing my weird little zombie story!

I'd also like to shout out my fellow winners in the postgraduate and staff categories - Saul Leslie and Professor Frank Shovlin - whose stories 'Loggerhead' and 'Nothing Rests' blew me away and did not contain any penis jokes, making my story look even more ridiculous by comparison.

I think there's a lot of debate about science and art, and science in art, and which is more important, but I prefer not to get into fancy conversations like that. People used to say that I was equally good at science and art growing up, but that's just a nice way of reframing the fact that I'm actually equally bad at both. I just kind of wiggle around and, like a stupid little worm, fail to realise that the pouring rain of creativity I hear up above is actually just the thumping of a hungry seagull's feet.

In all seriousness, I think art is everywhere, and in medicine in particular.

It's in the squeaking of the crash cart's wheels. It's in the air whooshing through a brachial cuff. And it's in the tears of a student doctor who forgot that he actually had to reference his diversity essay, because of course you do - you have to reference everything at university.

I think the very best of art is found in the most mundane places. In things that people see every day, all the time, that you just happen to hold a magnifying glass up to and say, 'hey everyone, look at this - looks kind of weird, doesn't it?'. Then you get £500. At least that's how it worked for me.

I think everyone's minds work very differently, especially when it comes to art, but I personally find creative limitations to be so helpful. Tight deadlines and strict prompts can be really good for the brain juices. Sometimes I tell myself I have to write my next piece in the second person, or that I have to write it in 5 minutes, or that it has to be about what a lamppost thinks. If you can't think of any of these sorts of prompts on your own, there are millions online you can use!

I’d also recommend doing things you like. It sounds simple enough, but I can't tell you the number of times I've been writing a story/script, reading it over and over again, and just not enjoying it. But then I heard an amazing piece of advice - if you don’t enjoy writing it, no-one will enjoy reading it. So I spice things up accordingly. And now, even if everyone else hates what I've made, I'll at least get a chuckle out of it.”

Discover more

  • Everyone at the University is invited to download and enjoy their free copy of the Changing Natures e-book from the Great Read webpage (link).
  • Learn more about the Liverpool Literary Festival on the University web area (link).
  • Read about Dr Amir Khan’s chat with Liverpool GP Society when they also met at this year’s Literary Festival (link).