18-05-2025
I was writing about how not to die — then cancer came
When she was writing a book called How Not to Die (Too Soon), the public health expert Professor Devi Sridhar received a shock phone call.
Abnormal cells had been found during a routine smear test and, just as she was describing how to increase your chances of living to 100, she faced the prospect of her own death.
'That would have been the greatest irony, to die before the book comes out,' she says, remembering the call which came through while she was commuting to work across the Scottish capital on a bus. Sridhar, 40, holds a chair in global public health at Edinburgh University.
Now the pages of her new guide to longevity — due to be published by Penguin on June 12
