1. He was born in Ethiopia in 1955 to Indian parents.
2. He went to medical school in Ethiopia and India.
3. He came to the US to complete his medical residency in Tennessee.
4. He did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine.
5. He has much experience working with HIV/AIDS patients.
6. Needing a change, he attended the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree.
7. Soon after, he became Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center.
8. While in Texas, he wrote his first bestselling book, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, about his experiences in residency.
9. His second book, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, is a story about his friend as well as his first wife.
10. In 2002 he became founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center.
11. He was recruited to Stanford University in 2007.
12. His writings have appeared in various publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
13. His first novel, Cutting for Stone, was published in 2009.
A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.
Have you read any of his writings?
