As well as being a novelist, Nicci Gerrard is a journalist, a campaigner and a humanist celebrant. In 2016 she won the Orwell Prize for Journalism, for 'Exposing Britain's Social Evils', for a piece exploring the 'language' of dementia. Following her father's terrible final year and his death in November 2014, she and her friend Julia Jones founded John's Campaign, which insists that the carers of people with dementia have the same right as parents of sick children to accompany them when in hospital. The campaign, which seeks to make care for those who are vulnerable and powerless more compassionate, began in a kitchen but is now a national movement, recognised by NHS policy makers, by charities, by nurses and doctors and carers. Four hundred hospitals have already signed up to the campaign.