Own-voice stories allow representation to be authentic and help shift perceptions of disability. The same is true for other under-represented voices.


James says: “Authors sometimes need to be given permission to write more directly from their own experience. Sue Cheung’s Chinglish, one of the first British children’s books about growing up behind the counter of a Chinese takeaway, was an example of this. SF’s Tyger, too. And Can Bears Ski? by Raymond Antrobus and Polly Dunbar. There’s a particular power when writers manage to tap into those stories that sit at the core of who they are. “At the same time, authors should still write from their imagination about experiences not their own. But there’s now an expectation that, when writing about different identities, authors should tread carefully, do their research, and ask themselves why they are trying to tell those stories. We are seeing that change in approach around disability now.”


James says that “it has taken the publishing industry some time to realise that most books about disabled characters have very little to do with the reality of disability, and some books are doing active harm.”


James and Lucy with family.


This is the inherent danger of poorly-researched characters, or worse, resorting to tropes. This is something both James and Lucy have spoken about, and Lucy says: “There is a feeling that something is better than nothing – that some representation, no matter how poorly researched or unrealistic, is better than no representation. Actually, we would take the opposite view and say that


6 PEN&INC.


Spring-Summer 2023


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