Outcast

A revelatory history of humanity - spanning thousands of years and ranging across the world - told through the lens of a misunderstood disease.
'Remarkable . . . grippingly and humanely recounted.'
PHILIPPE SANDS
'It is impossible not to be moved by the lives unfolding in these pages, impossible not to be left transformed and enlightened. '
LEILA ABOULELA
WINNER OF THE 2023 RSL GILES ST AUBYN AWARD
The story of leprosy is the story of humanity.
It is a story of isolation and exclusion, of resilience and resistance, one which has permeated global cultures in myriad ways for thousands of years, dividing the world into the 'clean' and the 'unclean'.
Oliver Basciano's journey to demystify leprosy takes him from the Romanian border, the hinterlands of Brazil and the fringes of Siberia to the Japanese archipelago, Robben Island and the northern settlements of Mozambique. It reveals the image of medieval leprosy to be a nineteenth-century myth invented to justify gross mistreatment of patients, a blueprint used for further state-sanctioned stigma: colonialism, racism, religious and economic exploitation.
Basciano meets those living with leprosy today, those exiled to various leprosaria around the world and forced to find homes away from home; he hears stories of community and perseverance in the face of grave circumstances, of lives bound to each other through shared experience and a refusal to be cast aside.
A work of outstanding empathy, Outcast casts new light on the human condition in the modern world, asking: does a society's sense of itself always rely on ostracisation?
'A new kind of travel book - across continents and, more importantly, across the partitions that separate the healthy from the damned - Outcast is a revisionist history that makes you realise, when you turn its last page, how differently you look at the world than you did when you first cracked its spine.'
BENJAMIN MOSER

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Financial Times, The White Review and Times Literary Supplement; he has contributed to programming on BBC Radio 4 and is Editor-at-Large at ArtReview. In 2018 he was a judge for the Turner Prize. Outcast is his first book; he was the recipient of the 2023 RSL Giles St Aubyn Award, awarded for debut works of non-fiction.