Gavin Francis FRSL (born 1975) is a Scottish physician and a writer on travel and medical matters. He was raised in Fife, Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh as a GP. [1]
Born in Fife in 1975, Francis studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and joined the Emergency department at the old Royal Edinburgh Hospital. [2] Having qualified as a physician, Francis spent ten years travelling on all seven continents. [3] Francis spent time working in India and Africa, made several trips to the Arctic, and is said to have crossed Eurasia and Australasia by motorcycle. [4]
Francis was working at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh when he decided to undertake a 15-month position as the resident doctor with the British Antarctic Survey. [5] He arrived at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica via the RRS Ernest Shackleton, a supply ship, on Christmas Eve, 2002, after a two-month voyage. [6]
Francis's experiences eventually formed the basis for his second book, Empire Antarctica (2012); his first book, True North: Travels in Arctic Europe (2008), detailed his experiences travelling in Arctic Europe from Unst to Svalbard. [7] [8]
His Adventures in Human Being (2015) won the Saltire Society Literary Award for non-fiction and was a British Medical Association (BMA) book of the year. [9] [10] Empire Antarctica was a shortlisted finalist for a number of book awards in 2013, including the Ondaatje Prize and the Saltire Prize, but received its most notable honour in November 2013 at the Lennoxlove Book Festival [11] when it was named the 2013 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust's Scottish Book of the Year. [2]
Francis has been contributing articles and reviews to The Guardian since 2010, [12] the London Review of Books , and the New York Review of Books since 2013. [13] In addition to book reviews, his contributions have occasionally consisted of prose ruminations on medical topics such as stethoscopes and the human brain, an approach that led to his being commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to produce a collection of essays in this style.[ citation needed ]
His 2020 book Island Dreams was "a simple but sincere cartography of my own obsession with the twinned but opposing allures of island and city, of isolation and connection", and included 90 maps. [14] In 2021 he published Intensive Care: A GP, a community & COVID-19 describing his work in Edinburgh and Orkney during the COVID-19 pandemic. [7]
