A novel that imagines the schizophrenia of the 19th-century German judge Daniel Paul Schreber has been shortlisted for the Wellcome book prize, an award for books that engage with aspects of medicine.

Playthings by Alex Pheby review – the madness of Daniel Paul Schreber Read more

Worth £30,000, the Wellcome has been won in the past by fiction and non-fiction writing. Marion Coutts took the prize in 2015 for her memoir about her husband’s brain tumour and death, The Iceberg; Alice LaPlante won in 2011 for her mystery Turn of Mind, in which the main suspect has Alzheimer’s. This year, two novels are included on an “exceptional” shortlist of six that the award organisers said showcased “the breadth and depth of our encounters with medicine”, and represented “a collective conversation on medicine in literature today, demonstrating the wealth of human experience this cultural sector explores”.

Alex Pheby was shortlisted for his novel Playthings, which explores the life of Schreber, the Dresden judge who wrote an autobiographical account of his battle with mental illness, and Sarah Moss for Signs for Lost Children. The follow-up to Moss’s Bodies of Light, the novel concerns pioneering doctor Ally, who works at Truro asylum, while her husband Tom travels to Japan to build lighthouses.

Two memoirs were shortlisted by judges chaired by the broadcaster Joan Bakewell – Cathy Rentzenbrink’s bestselling account of how her brother lay in a coma for almost a decade after being hit by a car, The Last Act of Love, and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, about the author’s retreat to her childhood home of Orkney after a period of alcohol addiction in London.

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s exploration of psychosomatic illness, It’s All in Your Head, and Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, complete the lineup. Neurotribes, which investigates the rise in autism diagnoses and the history of the condition, won the Samuel Johnson prize last year, when it was called a “tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research, both scholarly and widely accessible”.

Bakewell, announcing the shortlist, said it had been an “exhilarating journey” to come up with the final six. “All the judges were engrossed by the range of books we had to consider: we each learned important things from the imaginative and inspiring way writers have addressed their subjects,” she said. “The shortlist reflects what has moved and inspired us most about books that deal with intimate and often complex matters of the human body and human experience. Each one has found its way not just on to the shortlist, but into our hearts.”

The other judges on the panel are Barts professor of cancer biology and author Frances Balkwill, and the writers Damian Barr, Tessa Hadley and Sathnam Sanghera. “What’s been so interesting, reading for the prize, is how many different ways there are of knowing about sickness and health, describing and exploring them: the subject has such powerful meaning, in memoir and in fiction, in medical speculation and in history,” said Hadley.

The Wellcome Collection’s James Peto said he was “delighted” that the shortlist included “fact and fiction and offers such moving insights into both body and mind and the ways in which our health shapes our lives”.

The winner of the award will be announced on 25 April.

The shortlist:

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Canongate)

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (Granta)

It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan (Chatto & Windus)

Playthings by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press)

The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador)

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman (Allen & Unwin)