www.thelancet.com Vol 388 July 2, 2016 13 The Lancet invites you to take a little time away from preparing for your clinical work, research, medical studies, consultations, or grant proposal and instead write an essay about what most concerns you in health care. The Wakley Prize is The Lancet’s annual essay competition. The prize will be awarded to the best essay on any topic of importance to medicine and the competition is open to anyone working in a healthrelated fi eld. We expect fi ne writing, originality, and thought-provoking argument—and for you to engage our hearts and our minds. What matters to you? Whatever it is, the essay is the ideal form to explore it. The informal, intimate style of an essay—balancing the personal voice with an inquisitive intellect—allows the author and their readers to explore an idea in an open-ended and invigorating way. In her essay “Montaigne”, Virginia Woolf celebrated Michel de Montaigne’s essays: “We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach...All his eff ort was to write himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth.” Woolf, herself a fi ne essay writer, admired the way Montaigne’s essays followed his “own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection”. Montaigne’s enduring quest to explore “Que scais-je?”—what do I know?—was perfectly suited to the form he pioneered. A good essay is like an improvised walking tour rather than a satnav-guided road trip: you might end up somewhere you didn’t anticipate. And so this year we ask readers to take us on an unexpected journey by entering the Wakley Prize. We want to be informed, moved, and entertained. The winner of the Wakley Prize will receive £2000, and the essay will be published in The Lancet and feature in our podcast. Essays of no more than 2000 words should be submitted through The Lancet’s electronic submission system by Oct 17, 2016, with “Wakley Prize” selected as the publication type. Essays should not contain any information that might identify individual patients. Only one submission per author is allowed. Entries will be anonymised, and judged by the editors of The Lancet. So surprise us with your provocative originality and enter the 2016 Wakley Prize—we look forward to reading your essay.