Outcast: A History of Leprosy, Humanity and the Modern World

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, author of The Last Colony

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’. Despite the forced segregation of patients ending in the 1980s, the disease still retains a dark reputation to this day.

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 mediaeval 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 how they have refused to be cast aside.

Outcast is a kaleidoscopic work of outstanding empathy and compassion, written by a remarkable new literary talent. In casting light on the human condition in the modern world, it asks: does a society’s sense of itself always rely on ostracisation?