Polly Morland
Polly Morland is a British writer and documentary maker.
Career
She worked in television for 15 years as a producer and director of documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery, including The 9/11 Conspiracies, Who Wrote the Bible? and The Fourth Age 410 AD - 1066 AD in the series Seven Ages of Britain.Morland received a Jerwood Award in 2011 for work on her 2013 book The Society of Timid Souls: Or How to be Brave. The award was given by the Royal Society of Literature for "to authors engaged on their first major commissioned works of non-fiction". The book is a study of courage and takes its name from a group set up by 1940s American concert pianist Bernard Gabriel to help performers overcome stage fright. In the course of the book Morland talks to "soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils... a man who fixes the upper sections of skyscrapers, and is afraid of heights... people who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases... a former armed robber."
Her 2022 work A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. The book mirrors John Berger's 1967 work A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, after Morland found a copy of this work while clearing her mother's house and realised that it was an account of a GP's life in the same area. She contacted a contemporary doctor working in the area, who herself had been inspired to take up medicine after reading Berger's book as a child, and the book is an account of her 21st-century general practice.
Morland held a Royal Society of Literature fellowship at Cardiff University in 2020–2023.