This project consists of a creative component, the narrative non-fiction manuscript, Patting The Shark (Penguin, 2022), and an accompanying exegesis, Towards A New Language of Cancer. Patting The Shark documents my experience living with stage four, metastatic prostate cancer since July 2015, a project that began as personal writing therapy and evolved into a published book and PhD. It highlights the lack of allied health support for men diagnosed with prostate cancer, and particularly the impacts of its frontline treatment, what's euphemistically known as hormone therapy but amounts to chemical castration. The principal aim of this project then is to help others living with cancer, particularly men with advanced prostate cancer, to alleviate the misery of their grim prognosis and the side effects of treatment by documenting my own experiences in striving to maintain good health and quality of life. At the core of this intent is the challenge of truly accepting our mortality, staring into the abyss, and discovering a greater richness to life through a deep awareness of its impermanence. The methodological process requires me to segue quite seamlessly between personal memoir, long form journalism, academic analysis, particularly literary health science perspectives in presenting the most relevant research to support or challenge my personal experiences. Creative non-fiction allows me to combine the tools of personal memoir with a more journalistic and academic analysis of the relevant health science research, to explore both the emotion and the clinical data of my chosen topic. It allows for nuanced, in-depth and personal explorations of true to life topics. My aim is to utilise the vagaries and possibilities of the form to highlight the multi-faceted, psycho-social challenges of a cancer diagnosis and the quest for successful strategies to maintain quality of life. By combining and balancing rigorous academic research with highly personal and candid memoir writing, in effect melding art and analysis, my aim is to reveal deeper truths around how men with prostate cancer can live full and meaningful lives, whatever the duration. Creative non-fiction goes beyond data to delve into the day-to-day minutiae of living with cancer. By providing an intimate window into this experience, I hope to demystify the reality of living with advanced cancer and a contemplation of mortality. As a working journalist my entire adult life, my writing practice has historically been based upon an ability to process large quantities of information and research material and distil and synthesise this into accessible journalism for a general audience. I have also traditionally told other people's stories with the journalist's supposed goal of objectivity and a certain professional distance or detachment. This project requires a new approach in voice and style - to tell my own story and confront the feelings of vulnerability and nakedness this can inspire, in a sense unlearning some of the formality often embedded in the traditional journalistic process to write into and open out the discomfort of my circumstances. The exegesis Towards a New Language of Cancer, was shaped and informed by this writing and publishing process. Specifically, the catharsis I experienced in writing Patting The Shark, and a form of peer support many readers reported experiencing led to an exploration of writing therapy and bibliotherapy (therapeutic reading) more broadly, particularly in the context of the psycho-social challenges of a cancer diagnosis. I also conducted a literature review of cancer memoirs and trauma memoirs to understand how other writers had used creative and narrative non-fiction to process difficult emotions like grief and trauma. These explorations in turn helped me develop deeper understanding of how language has the potential to help or harm those living with cancer. This understanding also has implications for cancer discourse more generally, physician/patient interactions and the various forms of patient information provided to those living with cancer. In short, this project seeks to examine how a more nuanced understanding of language and storytelling can offer new, low cost, easily deliverable and evidence-based tools in addressing the unmet psycho-social challenges of living with cancer.