Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2015: Marion Coutts wins for memoir about husband Tom Lubbock's brain tumour struggle

The Iceburg has won this year's most coveted medical-literary accolade

Marion Coutts was tonight named winner of the medically-themed Wellcome Trust Book Prize for The Iceberg which she wrote about her husband's, The Independent's art critic Tom Lubbock, life with, and eventual death from, a brain tumour.

The artist and writer's account of her husband's struggle was described as "wise, moving and beautifully constructed" by travel writer Bill Bryson, who chaired the judging panel.

He said it was "painful to read, but beautifully expressed," continuing: "She recalls things with such vivid detail that you almost feel you’re-reliving this experience with her in real time.”

Funded by charity the Wellcome Trust, the £30,000 prize aims to bridge the gap between literature and science and is open to fiction or nonfiction works published in Britain with a medical or medical-science theme.

Lubbock, a brilliant critic and writer, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008 soon after the couple had their first child.

Marion Coutts with Tom Lubbock and their son (Marion Coutts)

He gradually lost the ability to speak, read or write and Coutts' book charts the family's attempt to remain intact in the face of the advancing disease, which killed Lubbock in 2011.

Coutts' book was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards 2014.

Lubbock's own account of his illness, Until Further Notice, I am Alive,was published in 2012 and his writing has been credited with inspiring Nick Payne's award-winning play, Constellations, about a pleuropulmonary blastoma sufferer.

Other finalists for this year's Wellcome prize include neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's memoir Do No Harm; archaeologist Alice Roberts' exploration of evolution The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being; Scott Stossel's mental-health history My Age of Anxiety; and the novels All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews and Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss.