From 20 November to 20 December, we’re celebrating UK Disability History Month at the National Library of Wales with a new book display in the Reading Room. The month provides an important opportunity to reflect on the lives and experiences of disabled people through the centuries and celebrate their contributions to our society and culture. The selected books offer a variety of perspectives and approaches – from fiction to histories, poetry to critical essays, in Welsh and English.
Fiction
The fiction choices include two novels for young adults in Welsh, exploring the experiences and challenges of growing up with a disability. In Tami by Mared Roberts, one of the series Y Pump published last year, we meet a 16-year-old girl navigating changing (and difficult) friendships along with being the only student at school in a wheelchair due to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. #helynt by Rebecca Roberts won the Wales Book of the Year and the Tir na n-Og Prize in 2021 and was praised by judges as a ‘classic’ of YA literature. In the novel, teenager Rachel misses the bus to school one day, changing the course of her life forever.
In English-language fiction, you can find A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll, which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in the same year as #helynt: the story follows an autistic 11-year-old seeking to memorialize the women once tried as witches in her Scottish village and was made into a BBC series in 2023.
Finally, the selection includes a novel for adults: the 2014 bestseller All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr, which is partly written from the perspective of a blind French girl called Marie-Laure LeBlanc during the Second World War as she seeks refuge in her uncle’s house in Saint Malo, Brittany.
Poetry and Drama
Ultimatum Orangutan is the second collection by Indonesian poet and artist Khairani Barokka. It explores colonialism, environmentalism and the climate crisis through the prism of chronic illness and disability. It offers poems where ‘the body—particularly the disabled body—is centred as an ecosystem in its own right’ (Nine Arches Press). Alongside these radical and defiant verses is a theatrical interpretation of the acclaimed contemporary epic Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (a writer originally from Odessa in the former USSR). In Kaminsky’s long poem on war and resistance, a deaf boy is killed for disobeying orders he couldn’t hear. The next day, the whole town wakes up deaf. The stage adaptation is told through a mixture of spoken English, British Sign Language (BSL), creative captioning and silence.
Non-fiction and Photography
To mark the history of disability, many of the selected titles offer factual and critical approaches to the subject, including histories, personal narratives, and essay collections.
Edited by Sioned Erin Hughes, Byw yn fy nghroen is a collection of personal essays by twelve young contributors living with long-term health conditions, both mental and physical. Another recipient of a Tir na n-Og Prize (2020), the ages of the authors vary widely – from ten to twenty-four – and so do their experiences, which are described honestly and powerfully.
Ramping up rights: an unfinished history of British disability activism by journalist Rachel Charlton-Dailey and Queer Disability Through History by Daisy Holder offer much-needed stories of disability activists changing the social and political landscape over the centuries. The latter explores the shared history between queer and disabled groups – drawing from famous examples such as Frida Kahlo and Michelangelo – and acknowledges the need for LGBTQ+ movements to consistently ensure welcoming and accessible spaces for disabled members. Charlton-Dailey investigates the overlooked history of disabled rights and includes interviews with campaigners and disabled people: it is ‘a story of the community’s fight for survival in a dehumanising system’ (Bethany Handley).
More academic texts contain multi-faceted approaches to disability, society, culture, and politics. Disability and Political Representation, Colonizing Disability, and A very capitalist condition see attitudes, experiences and perspectives towards disability shaped by wider forces and movements. In A very capitalist condition: a history and politics of disability (2016), socialist writer Roddy Slorach argues that capitalism created disability by turning our bodies into commodities on the market, and by labelling bodies that ‘don’t fit’ or not financially viable as problems. The Oxford University Press Disability and Political Representation (Evans and Reher, 2024) examines the very real and sometimes insurmountable barriers that disabled people face in participating in politics, as well as the need for increased political representation so that disabled people’s voices can be heard on a high political level, so as to affect change. In Colonising Disability, Esme Cleall draws on a variety of historical sources from the time of the British Empire to explore how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference', arguing that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race.
Lastly, The Reckoning by Christopher John Ball offers a glimpse into the history of disability activism, with a series of monochrome photographs over a ten-year period. Photographer John Ball documented the lobby group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) as they organised protests and events in an attempt to raise awareness of the severe impact of austerity under an unsympathetic Tory government.
Of course, these titles are only the tip of the iceberg: the library houses over six and a half million books and also offers access to electronic legal deposit books in the Reading Room where you can access the most recent titles on disability, including Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility and Ellen Clifford’s The War on Disabled People, to name but two.
The books are there on display for anyone to pick up and peruse. We hope to see you in the Reading Room soon!
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