The Barbellion Prize announced its winner for 2022 in February, this year.
The book prize is dedicated to the furtherance of ill and disabled voices in writing. The prize has been awarded annually (since 2020) to an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and/or disability.
The prize is named in tribute to English diarist W.N.P. Barbellion, who wrote eloquently on his life with multiple sclerosis (MS) before his death in 1919.
For more information about this year’s prize, you can visit: https://www.thebarbellionprize.com/
The Journal of A Disappointed Man
By W.N.P Barbellion
The young naturalist W.N.P. Described as a remarkably candid record of living with multiple sclerosis as ‘a study in the nude’. It begins as an ambitious teenager’s notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of 26, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease. His prose is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death.
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life (Barbellion Prize 2022 Longlist)
by Alice Wong (editor of Disability Visibility)
This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist’s journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project. In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong. Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organiser, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future.
Hybrid Humans: dispatches from the frontiers of man and machine (Barbellion Prize 2022 Longlist)
By Harry Parker
Harry Parker’s life changed overnight, when he lost his legs to an IED in Afghanistan. Here he takes us on a journey through the exhilarating landscape of a very human kind of hacking, meeting those pushing the limits of our bodies and brains – and grappling with his own new identity and disability along the way. What happens when our lives become enmeshed with technology? Most of us are ‘coupled’ 24/7 to our mobile phones, reliant on glasses, or pacemakers – but we are living in an era of dizzying new possibilities. Parker meets the soldiers having cutting-edge osseointegration, the first DIY cyborgs and biohackers tinkering in garages, and the scientists and surgeons pioneering the latest robotics and implants. He traces how they might lead us to powerful, liberating new possibilities for what a body can be – and how to be human is to be hybrid.
A Still Life: A Memoir (Barbellion Prize Shortlist 2021)
By Josie George
Josie George lives in a tiny terraced house in the urban West Midlands with her son. Since her early childhood, she has lived with the fluctuating and confusing challenge of disabling chronic illness. Her days are watchful and solitary, lived out in the same hundred or so metres around her home. But Josie’s world is surprising, intricate, dynamic. She has learned what to look for: the complex patterns of ice on a frozen puddle; the routines of her friends at the community centre; the neighbourhood birds in flight; the slow changes in the morning light, in her small garden, in her growing son, in herself. Josie sets out to tell the story of her still life, over the course of a year. As the seasons shift, and the tides of her body draw in and out, Josie begins to unfurl her history.
How To Live When You Could Be Dead
By Deborah James
So how do you flip your mind from a negative spiral into realistic hope? How do you stop focusing on the why and realise that why not me is just as valid a pathway? How we learn to respond to any given situation empowers us or destroys us. We have the ability in our mind to dictate the outcome – bad or good – and with the right skills and approach, we can be the master of it. This book will show you how. It will awaken you to question your life as if you didn’t have tomorrow and live it in the way you want to today. It will show you how to build a growth mindset and through this invite you to think about what you could do if you believed you could change and do anything you want.
Kika and Me
By Amit Patel
Amit Patel is working as a trauma doctor when a rare condition causes him to lose his sight within thirty-six hours. Totally dependent on others and terrified of stepping outside with a white cane after he’s assaulted, he hits rock bottom. He refuses to leave home on his own for three months. With the support of his wife Seema he slowly adapts to his new situation, but how could life ever be the way it was? Then his guide dog Kika comes along. But Kika’s stubbornness almost puts her guide dog training in jeopardy – could her quirky personality be a perfect match for someone? Meanwhile Amit has reservations – can he trust a dog with his safety? Paired together in 2015, they start on a journey, learning to trust each other before taking to the streets of London and beyond.
Also available as an eBook at Libby app with library membership.
The Perseverance (Winner of the Ted Hughes Award in 2019)
By Raymond Antrobus
The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience.
Summaries provided via Westminster Libraries’ catalogue at Westminster libraries and archives | Westminster City Council
Georgina, Charing Cross Library
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