he author was repeatedly told that no one wanted to read fun books with disabled heroes. Now she has won the £5,000 Waterstones children’s book
prize for her debut, A Kind of Spark
When Scottish author Elle McNicoll was first trying to enter the publishing world, she was repeatedly told that people didn’t want to read about an autistic heroine. “In job interviews, I was saying that I wanted to see more books with disabled characters in them that were not traumatic, boring or educational, but fun and full of life. A lot of the reactions were, ‘Waterstones don’t like books like that’,” she says.
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