Katharine Quarmby
Award-winning writer, editor and journalist.
Tag: Katharine Quarmby
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Over the last few years many disability hate crime campaigners have called for perpetrator analysis. I am one of those: I have been advocating for it since 2008, when I wrote the disability hate crime report, Getting Away With Murder, (for the UK Disabled People’s Council, Disability Now magazine and Scope). At the (British) Disability Hate Crime Network,…
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In 2013, when my book, No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers came out, I interviewed some elders from the community about the importance of taking part in elections and what they intended to do. Of course things have moved on since then and Operation Traveller Vote has grown…
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It was great to hear Sam Lee talk about his project, collecting songs from Irish Travellers and the Romani people, on Radio 4 this week. This is such important work, and Sam’s been patiently doing it for some years now. Romani and Traveller singers have kept the flame of our common folk music alive, for…
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This new short story, published as a Thistle Single on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Priest-Assassin-Archduke-Franz-Ferdinand-ebook/dp/B00LAECAQW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1403768284&sr=8-3&keywords=katharine+quarmby is my third Single, as they are now called, to come out in the last couple of years. The first was an exploration of my search for my Iranian birth father, Blood and Water. The second was a short story, loosely fictionalised, about filming…
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I enjoyed doing my talk at the Wadham Human Rights Forum at Oxford University, on how human rights journalism is evolving in the age of the Internet – and how to fund the new human rights journalism. The Forum has had some wonderful thinkers visit – from Clive Stafford-Smith to James Harding, former editor of…
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I was really pleased to hear that No Place to Call Home has been shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2014. Trustee for the Bread & Roses Nik Górecki says: “We had a record number of submissions this year, and from an ever-growing range of publishers, which has made for a…
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I wrote this blog a couple of weeks ago for the think-tank Respublica and was pleased to see how many positive comments it got on Twitter and other social media sites. It’s essentially a slice of family history – both my mother (adoptive) and I have roots both in the UK and abroad. My mum…
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An innocent Iranian, Bijan Ebrahimi, is dead, another name to add to the grim list of disabled people falsely accused of sexual crimes they didn’t commit- and then cruelly murdered. I grieve for him and his family. I share an Iranian heritage too, on my birth father’s side. (If you want to read about my…
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A round-up of reviews here. Ian Birrell, who also reviewed my last book, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people, posted a very thoughtful review in the Observer. He concluded that it was “An important book by an impressive journalist” although he did feel there was a bit too much reporting from Dale Farm which does…
Katharine Quarmby 