Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Award-winning writer "said she was sued by Airbnb guests who claimed they were triggered by her disability aids. But the incident wasn’t real, and neither was she"

Long article by Katherine Denkinson for Vice:

Relatively unknown until November 2020, [her] status in the literary community grew after she won the Financial Times’ Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize, which is open to writers under the age of 35. The winning entry is published in the FT Weekend, the weekend edition of the British newspaper, although the competition does not appear to have been run for the last two years. [Her] entry was a moving essay about her diagnosis with Huntington’s Disease, a debilitating, degenerative genetic condition that affects the brain. Written using a speech-to-text computer programme, the essay won her a £1,000 prize. 

The piece was also praised by influential people

...

she has become a high-profile advocate for people living with disabilities, and a well-known figure on the Irish literary scene. She has a profile on the publishing house Penguin’s website, and has appeared at festivals in County Kerry, on the Guilty Feminist podcast, and at writers’ workshops in St John’s Theatre, Listowel and online. 

She has also been interviewed by British and Irish media, including the Irish Independent and for talk radio station NewsTalk, as well as local radio, discussing her diagnosis. She wrote for the website of a prestigious scientific institution, the Wellcome Collection, too. Speaking on Radio Kerry in May this year, she claimed that Netflix had purchased a screenplay from her, apparently the first ever written using assistive technology. 

Everything seemed to be going so well