Rachel Clarke

Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books.  Breathtaking (2021) reveals how her NHS hospital confronted Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award, long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize and chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. It explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life. Your Life in My Hands (2017) documents life as a junior doctor on the NHS frontline.

Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries, primarily for Channel 4, focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She began her medical degree at the age of 29, qualifying as a doctor in 2009.

Rachel writes for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New York Times, Independent, New Statesman, Telegraph, Prospect, BMJ, NEJM and Lancet. She makes regular television and radio appearances on, for example, BBC Question Time, BBC Radio 4 Today, BBC Newsnight, Channel 4 News, GMB, BBC Woman’s Hour, ITV News and Sky News, among others.

Rachel cares deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible – and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change.