BOOKS


Category Spotlight The Disability Issue


Category Spotlight


The Disability Issue Y


A preview of new titles published between October 2021–September 2022


There are many fantastic tales from own-voice perspectives on the horizon, but unfortunately a number of the submissions fell way short of expectations in terms of representation


n


Polly Atkin Poet and author, @pollyrowena


oung readers and fans of non- fiction will be spoilt for choice in the coming year for own-voices


representation. There are some brilliant disabilit memoirs and volumes of poetry which are an essential counterbalance to tales of “overcoming” disabilit. Titles submited to the preview included books by a parent, sibling, friend or carer of a disabled person; by people with a different disabilit to that portrayed in the book; and by non-disabled people featuring disabled protagonists. Some of these used terms many disabled people consider slurs, or dehumanised and demeaned disabled characters for


comic or sentimental effect, proving the importance of disabilit representation at every stage of book production. A disabled editor would notice this. It is particularly disappointing to see so many picture books in which disabilit representation is only one wheelchair- using child in an ensemble illustration. Representation maters. Bad representa- tion might be even more damaging than no representation. Please, no more supercrips or supervillains, Pollyannas or martrs. It’s time for new narratives. Disabled writers need to be supported at every stage to tell those stories as beauti- fully, messily and honestly as we live.


Category highlights


Fiction


Chloe Timms The Seawomen Hodder Studio, June, hb, £14.99, 9781529369564


Esta lives with her grandmother on an island controlled by a restrictive religious sect. The island is isolated geographically and socially from both the wider human world and the terrible seawomen, who the islanders are taught to fear and persecute, along with any human women deemed to be corrupted by them. With shades of The Mercies, The GracekeeperS and The Carhullan Army; an excellent addition to reproductive dystopias.


Poetry Hannah Hodgson


163 days Seren, February, Price and Format TBC


Highly-anticipated first full collection of poetry from multi-award winning young writer living with life-limiting illness. The collection uses lyrics fragments to chart 163 days Hodgson spent in an isolation ward when she was in her late teens. An extract from this début collection won a Northern Writer’s Award from New Writing North in 2020, to support its completion.


YA


Alice Wong (ed) Disability Visibility: 17 First-Person


Stories for Today Random House, 26th October, £13.99, hb, 9780593381670


A new version of this vital collection of personal essays, edited to be accessible to a YA audience from the critically acclaimed adult book, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century’. Editor Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker and research consultant based in San Francisco, and the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project and Podcast.


Middle-grade


Sophie Cleverly; Hannah Peck (illus) The Violet Veil Mysteries:


A Case of Misfortune Harper Children’s, 6th January, £6.99, pb, 9780008308018


Violet Veil is an under- taker’s daughter and a detective. Although her brother, Thomas, says girls can’t be detectives that can’t stop Violet. A gripping gothic detective drama which will hook readers in from the start. This is the second Violet Veil Mystery from estab- lished author Cleverly, who lives with Crohn’s Disease.


Memoir


Jan Grue; Becky Crook (trans)


I Live a Life Like Yours Pushkin, 4th November, £14.99, hb, 9781782276555


“A diagnosis”, Grue writes, “has its own gravitational field”. Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, a diagnosis removed in adulthood, and replaced with uncertainty. This is a brilliant disability memoir—lyrical, frag- mented—frank about pain and about love, about independence and interdependence, about the clinical gaze and internal ableism, about disabled anger as well as disabled joy.


Anthology


Lisa Kelly, Sophie Stone (eds) What Meets the Eye?


The Deaf Perspective Arachne, 25th November, £9.99, pb, 9781913665487


A ground-breaking anthology mixing poems, short fiction and short scripts from UK-based Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing writers responding to the theme of “move- ment”. It includes work from Colly Metcalfe, Hala Hashem, Josephine Dickinson, Ksenia Balabina, Lynne Buckle and many more, and a foreword by prize- winning poet Raymond Antrobus.


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24th September 2021

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