Neil Ashman is Group Director for Transformation, and newly appointed as the next hospital CEO of the Royal London & Mile End Hospitals.
Dr Ashman specialised at the Royal London before being appointed as a consultant nephrologist – specialising in diseases of the kidney – almost 20 years ago.
Since then he has held a variety of key roles including chair of the medicine board, national clinical advisor for the NHSE Renal Service Transformation Programme, and London clinical lead for outpatients within the elective recovery programme.
He was deputy CEO for the period in which The Royal London team achieved a Good rating from the Care Quality Commission, and was influential in setting up key partnerships in Tower Hamlets with community services, GPs and the local authority.
Patrick Melrose novels - Edward St Aubyn
The semi-autobiographical books follow Patrick from his traumatic childhood in England and France with his abusive father and alcoholic mother, through his drug-addicted, hedonistic twenties to the challenges of having his own family and his eventual road to recovery as he finally faces his demons. Also have now been adapted to a Sky Atlantic TV series.
Neil says: "Clear-eyed if very dark satire, collected from five books published across 20 years. Each re-reading is better than the last."
Selected Poems - Derek Walcott
Drawing from every stage of his career, this volume collects selected poems from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's lifetime of work. Here we find all of Walcott's essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean's colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human.
Neil says: "Mainly his long-form poems, weaving myth, journeys and island homes – to read overlooking the sea."
Chernobyl Prayer - Svetlana Alexievich
The startling history of the Chernobyl disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the Nobel prize in literature 2015. On 26 April 1986, at 1.23am, a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.
Neil says: "All her writing deserves reading – layering ordinary peoples’ witness of extraordinary events into something that feels like folklore."
Poems: 1962 - 2020 - Louise Gluck
From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.
Neil says: "A third Nobel laureate, spare and internal poems from a wonderful poet who rarely used two words when she could use one. And a bargain – twelve collections in this volume. If I could only take one volume, Averno."
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, Riddley Walker is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.
Neil says: "One to read aloud – a short, dystopian book that becomes a long, dystopian read. Once read, never forgotten. And a punt for Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child as a masterpiece of read-aloud children’s fiction."
Record:
My album would be Talk Talk's ‘Spirit of Eden’. All good desert islands should have this on the playlist.
Luxury Item:
"I’d like to be cast away on a holiday desert island with loungers and gardens, and have chosen reads to enjoy in the sunshine. And my item would always be good boots. No cars on the island, hopefully, so good walking."