James Catchpole and Jen Campbell introduce Owning It!, stories about disabled childhoods
About Author
Owning It is a new anthology by disabled authors, who share their stories and experiences of growing up disabled.
James Catchpole and Lucy Catchpole run The Catchpole Agency, representing authors and illustrators of children's picture books, non-fiction and novels, including Polly Dunbar, SF Said and Michelle Robinson. They live in Oxford with their two young daughters.
Jen Campbell grew up in the north east of England and now lives in London. She an award-winning poet and bestselling author of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Jen has worked in publishing for over 15 years, as an editor, content creator and disability advocate.
Interview
James Catchpole and Jen Campbell introduce Owning It!, stories about disabled childhoods (Faber)
April 2025
This varied collection of stories by 22 authors gives an incredible insight into growing up disabled and how the authors challenged people's perceptions of their disabilities and overcome their own unique challenges during their childhoods.
We hear more from co-editors James Catchpole and Jen Campbell about why they wanted to create this collection of stories, who is included, and the changes they hope it will help to foster.
More about Owning It: Our Disabled Childhoods In Our Own Words (Faber Children's Books)
Reviews: 'Owning It paves the way forward for equity and a strong, inspiring community.'
James Catchpole and Jen Campbell talk about creating 'Owning It!
Our Disabled Childhoods in Our Own Words'
1. Can you tell us about yourselves, and how you started writing for children?
James: Lucy and I are a married couple who run a children's literary agency, so we edit and sell children's stories to publishers - we don't usually write them…until one day, about ten years ago, an author-illustrator called Karen George sent me a story about a one-legged teddy bear. I told her that her bear was a lot like me, and maybe, as a one-legged man, I should try writing this bear's story. This eventually became the picture book What Happened to You? Lucy and I collaborated on the sequel You're So Amazing! and then she wrote her own picture book, Mama Car, about a young child and her mother who uses a wheelchair (as does Lucy). So, all of our books are about disability.
Jen: I've been working in the book industry for twenty years now - first as a children's bookseller, and now as an author and book reviewer. I've written 14 books for adults and children, across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and picture books. My children's books include The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers and the Franklin's Flying Bookshop series illustrated by Katie Harnett. I also run a Youtube channel where I talk about reading, the history of fairy tales, and the representation of disability and disfigurement in the media. There have been so many highlights over the years, but most of my favourite moments have involved taking my books into schools, chatting with children about fairy tales, disability and magic. And when Shilbottle School in Alnwick painted their entire library with the characters from my Franklin's Flying Bookshop series a few years ago, I did a lot of happy crying!
2. What is your new book, Owning It, about, and what will readers discover in its pages?
James: Owning It is about what it's really like to grow up with a disability. There have always been disabled children in children's books, but there still aren't many disabled writers of children's books. That means some of the ways disability is shown in children's books are demeaning and misleading.
We wanted the current generation of children to have a book of true stories by disabled writers, and we asked 20 of them to write down a memory from their own childhoods. So, if you've ever wondered what it might be like to have one leg, or use a wheelchair, or have dwarfism, or a disfigurement, or to be Blind or Deaf, this book will allow you to walk in the shoes of someone who does.
3. Why did you decide to put together this anthology, and how ground-breaking is it? Why is it important to make these stories available to children and what changes do you hope it will encourage?
James: Growing up with a disability can be hard. It's not easy to be different from your peers, and most disabled children don't have disabled family members or role models to help them find their way. We realised a book like this, full of the wisdom of a previous generation, would have helped us, as children. As far as we know, there's no other anthology like it. But between us, we knew we had enough contacts in the wonderfully supportive disabled community online to find the writers we would need, with a whole range of different disabilities, and from different countries and walks of life.
We hope it will be a companion for disabled children, to give them some ideas about how their futures might unfold; and we hope it'll provide a window for their non-disabled peers to better understand the experience of disability from the outside.
3. How did you go about finding writers to share their stories?
Jen: As a disabled bookseller and book reviewer, I've been on the hunt for good books by disabled authors for what feels like my entire life, and they've been thin on the ground - not because disabled folk don't write good books, obviously, but because of frustrating barriers within the publishing industry, and because non-disabled books about disability are often prioritised over Own Voices (I could write an essay on this, but we don't have time here). I have a whole bookcase dedicated to books by disabled authors that I've loved over the years, and it was so exciting to be able to reach out to some of my favourite people, asking them if they'd like to try their hand at writing something for this anthology.
James: As well as that, we couldn't have made this book without the internet. A few of our contacts we knew from the real world… I used to play amputee football with the poet Daniel Sluman, and with Ali Abbas, who became disabled as a child when an Allied bomb destroyed his home and family in the Iraq War. But we know the majority of our contributors through Instagram and YouTube, where we and Jen have active accounts. The challenge was to find writers, first and foremost, who could translate their charisma onto the page for children. Then the second criterion was to cover as many different disabilities as we could. Then geographical location and a range of ethnicities felt important, to make sure we were casting the net as wide as we could. Oh, and making sure we had enough men! It was easier finding female voices, we discovered… And then we had to persuade all these writers to share their private, formative memories with us. We're honoured that they did.
4. What kinds of experiences does the anthology include, and do any of the stories stand out for you?
James: I've touched in Ali Abbas' story already - of course, his is the most dramatic. His injuries were so bad that when a journalist took his picture, he became the literal poster-child for anti-war demonstrations around the world. But what continues to strike me is how much his story shares with those of our other contributors, who never knew war, violence or injury. The way a visible disability defines you in the eyes of the public, the roles - both positive and negative - that charity comes to play in your life, as a disabled child… These experiences, and many more, are shared by so many of our contributors, living lives that couldn't be any more different, in other regards.
5. You also include your own stories. What did you want to highlight to children through your own experiences?
James: My story is about the decision I made, around the age of 13, to stop using the prosthetic leg I'd always walked on, and to step out into the world as myself, with one leg and crutches. Suddenly I looked dramatically different from everyone else, but also, suddenly I could run and move freely. I exchanged looking normal for freedom, and never looked back.
Jen: My story is about living a dual life: my school life, and my home life - the latter being tied up in hospital visits and operations. For some reason, despite having over 20 operations as a child, needing to take time off for recovery and physio, I never spoke about hospital at school. School was a safe space where there were rules to follow and tasks to complete, and for the most part I really enjoyed it. But whenever we went on school trips, the gap between my home life and my school life would shrink, and I'd find myself uneasily dancing between the two. Perhaps this was because I was the only disabled person in my class, and, when the classroom setting and school uniform disappeared, my disability was looked at in an entirely different way.
6. What kinds of questions do you hope it will answer for both disabled and non-disabled readers?
James: It's by no means obvious, to non-disabled people, which parts of living with a disability are challenging and which aren't. In fact, it's often the opposite of what people expect. Physical limitations and access difficulties can be problematic, for sure, but, for most disabled people, there's nothing more difficult than how other people respond to you. And there's surely no better way to challenge ableism than to allow non-disabled readers to experience a little of what it means to be disabled, via storytelling.
There's just so much this book can do for disabled readers. Sometimes, we need to be able to imagine the future in order to be able to navigate (or endure) the present. Growing up without knowing anyone older who shares your disability can have some strange repercussions. How many disabled children can really picture how their lives might unfold?
7. At the end of the book, we find out more about the authors and their lives. What will readers learn about these authors and why did you want it included?
James: Many of us didn't take it for granted that we'd be able to have careers and families of our own. It's striking, how many of the childhood stories in this book end with a fast-forward to adulthood, and to jobs, marriages, children. These felt like genuinely valuable - and joyful - scenes to include, perhaps both as reassurance for our readers…but maybe also as catharsis for ourselves.
8. Are you planning further anthologies, or books that will support inclusion? How far do you feel publishing has come on this issue and what would you like to see change within the industry?
James: Disabled stories told by disabled writers feels like a genuinely new movement, in literature. There has just been so little of it, save for one or two hackneyed genres, like the rehab memoir. But misleading, demeaning disabled characters have been part of literature since its inception, from Tiresias the blind seer of Ancient Greece, to Richard the Third to Tiny Tim, up to the present day, where the bestselling disability stories - Wonder, Me Before You - are still written by non-disabled writers who make a virtue of writing the sorts of disabled characters that have always been popular. The industry has to find more disabled writers, for sure - but it also has to clear a space for them. And that means no more of these tired, ignorant tropes. Time to start afresh.
We don't have another anthology in the works - it's quite an undertaking to curate one! So, we could all do with a year off, I think. But personally, I do like the idea of a YA follow-up, if the world wants to read it….
9. What does a writing day look like for you? What are you working on currently, and what do you most enjoy doing to relax away from your laptops?
James: My writing days are few and far between - I'm, an agent, first and foremost, and I much prefer editing other people's stories than wrestling with the blank page! Time off? My children are six and ten, so I'm sure I'll enjoy time off whenever I see it next!
Jen: My daughter just turned one, so writing life has looked very different for me over the last year or so! James, Lucy and I have been working on Owning It for four years now, and in amongst that I've written two other children's books and a poetry collection. When I'm not working, which I currently do when my daughter's asleep, you can find me playing with her in the woods.
School events: Schools can contact Faber publicity to see if one or other of the contributors might be available for events.
Owning It: Our disabled childhoods in our own words
