AN EXHAUSTING SPLENDOUR
Wellcome Collection Non-Fiction Award
In 2025 I was awarded this award and joined the programme led by Spread the Word and Wellcome Collection alongside 5 other writers all working on books on health and being human. We took part in an intensive nine-month programme to develop our ideas into full-length proposals.
My proposal titled An Exhausting Splendour explored the narratives of disabled people and the histories of the spaces they have known or lived in, the book presents a series of connected essays on the ways that disability and architecture shape citizenship and how our rights and lives are defined. Across themes of eugenics, culture, art, literary criticism, architectural history, and most vitally the question of citizenship and its boundaries, the book brings the personal, the political, and the spatial together. It reveals through troubled histories of violence, tragedy, and experimentation, how disabled people have always fought for rights and transformed our understanding of space.
