Awards for Disabled Authors

Two authors who advocate passionately for disability rights were among the winners at the Society of Authors’ Awards.

Grace Spence Green won a Somerset Maugham Award for her memoir To Exist As I Am (Profile Books, Wellcome Collection).

In 2018, aged 22 and a fourth-year medical student, Grace sustained a spinal cord injury. She is now a full-time wheelchair user and, alongside her job as a junior doctor, is working to challenge the narratives surrounding disability, medicine and identity.

“Green’s experiences of overwhelming struggle and compassion forces readers to reconsider what it means to be independent, to be fair and to be equal,” said Akeem Balogun, one of the judges.

“Her memoir shows us humanity’s emotive capacity to care and expresses its limitless strength. To Exist As I Am had to be written, and it needs to be read.”

Bethany Handley won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry collection Cling Film (Seren Books), which explores existing as a young disabled woman in an ableist and inaccessible world.

“Bethany Handley’s poems are adventurous and imaginative in how they utilise the page and take no prisoners in their refusal to accept the many ways in which differently abled bodies are marginalised, patronised and appropriated,” said judge Rosie Miles.

The SoA awards recognise authors at all stages of their careers, for works of poetry, fiction and non- fiction, across a variety of genres.

For more information, visit www.societyofauthors.org.