CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Just my type
On UK Disability Awareness Day ANGUS REID celebrates the art of KEITH ARMSTRONG, a pioneering activist and writer whose unique body of artwork is a vision of protest and peace
Ward 16 poem, 1972; My Typewriter Is Not Typing Like It Used To, 1977; The Plane Tree, 1999
[Courtesy of Caseroom Press]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
KEITH ARMSTRONG (1950-2017) was a dynamic activist for the rights of people with disabilities. He was also highly creative, working as an artist, poet and musician, and a serious scholar of the history and linguistics of disability.
He contracted polio during infancy. In his teens he could just about walk but at the age of 20 he spent an entire year in hospital, undergoing complex back surgery. He would spend the rest of his life on crutches and, increasingly, in a wheelchair.
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