Adam Kay Books in Order

If you want his hospital diaries: This Is Going to Hurt → Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas → Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients.
If you prefer short real life NHS stories from many voices: Dear NHS.
If you love funny, factual reads for ages about 8-12: Kay's Anatomy → Kay's Marvellous Medicine → Kay's Incredible Inventions → Kay's Brilliant Brains.
If you are choosing for younger kids: Amy Gets Eaten → Dexter Procter the 10-Year-Old Doctor.
If you want a medical crime novel: A Particularly Nasty Case.

Adam Kay is a British writer, comedian and former doctor who turned his hospital diaries into best selling books. He is best known for This Is Going to Hurt, a brutally funny, quietly furious account of working in the National Health Service. Since leaving medicine, he has built a career that straddles books, television and live shows while still talking honestly about what life in a hospital does to people.

Kay was born in Brighton in 1980 and grew up in a Jewish family where medicine was almost the family business.

At Dulwich College and later Imperial College London he worked toward his medical degree, even as part of him wondered if this was really his path.

At medical school he also discovered that he liked making people laugh as much as he liked passing exams. He started performing in student shows, formed the musical comedy duo Amateur Transplants and began writing sharp, sweary songs that picked apart everyday life and hospital culture.

After graduating in 2004, Kay worked as a junior doctor in the NHS, specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology. The job meant exhausted night shifts, understaffed wards and a steady stream of emergencies, all while trying to keep both patients and senior doctors happy. A catastrophic obstetric case, in which a baby died after an undiagnosed complication, left him traumatised and convinced he could not stay in the profession without breaking completely.

During those years he kept a set of secret diaries, scribbled in brief gaps on the ward. Those notes eventually became This Is Going to Hurt, published in 2017, which mixed slapstick bodily mishaps with anger at how little support junior doctors receive. The book sat on bestseller lists for months, picked up major prizes and was translated widely, turning a once anonymous registrar into a very public voice for overworked medics. Kay later adapted it for television, writing a seven part drama that won a prominent award for its script.

He has returned to this material several times. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas pulls together his Christmas shifts, equal parts farce and heartbreak, while Dear NHS gathers thank you letters from more than one hundred contributors to raise money for health charities. In Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients he goes deeper, writing about childhood, sexuality, trauma, success and the long shadow medicine still casts over his life.

Alongside the adult books he has become a popular children's author. Titles such as Kay's Anatomy and Kay's Marvellous Medicine explain the human body and the history of medicine with disgusting detail and lots of jokes, while Kay's Brilliant Brains, Amy Gets Eaten and Kay's Incredible Inventions celebrate curiosity about science and the world. With Dexter Procter the 10-Year-Old Doctor and other stories he folds that medical know how into fiction, giving young readers a wildly improbable child doctor to root for.

Kay still performs live, often reading from his books, singing old comedy songs and talking about how it feels to relive the worst nights of his medical career on stage. His tone can swing from silly to raw in a few lines, but he keeps the language clear and conversational, as if he is telling stories to friends in a pub rather than lecturing an audience.

He lives in Oxfordshire with his husband, television producer James Farrell, and their two young children, born via surrogacy. Away from the spotlight he continues to speak up for health workers, mental health support and LGBTQ+ families, using the odd path of his own life as the thread that ties it all together.