Polly Morland and Rachel Clarke on A Fortunate Woman

Polly Morland is a writer and documentary maker. She worked for fifteen years in television, producing and directing documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery. She is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow in the School of Journalism, Media & Culture at Cardiff University. She is the author of several books, including The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How to Be Brave, which won the Guardian First Book Award and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. A Fortunate Woman was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2022.

Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and the author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books. The most recent of these, Breathtaking (2021), was adapted into an acclaimed television series, broadcast on ITV in 2024. It reveals how she and her colleagues confronted the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Your Life in My Hands(2017) documents life as a junior doctor. Before going to medical school, Rachel was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Lancet among others, and appears regularly on television and radio. Inspired by a visit to Ukraine during the conflict in late 2022, Rachel founded a UK-registered charity, Hospice Ukraine, which supports the work of local palliative care teams in Ukraine. Her new book, The Story of a Heart, is a moving and unforgettable story about how one family’s grief was transformed into a lifesaving gift.