Katharine Quarmby

Katharine Quarmby is a campaigning journalist and an award-winning film-maker. She has worked as a producer on BBC Panorama and Newsnight, news edited Disability Now magazine, served as a correspondent for the Economist and written for most of the broadsheet newspapers. She was the first British journalist to investigate disability hate crime and her report for Scope, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, has revolutionised thinking about the issue. Scapegoat (Portobello 2011) is her first book for adults. She won the AMIA International Literature Award for Scapegoat in 2011, and was a finalist for the Paul Foot Award in the same year, for her many years of campaigning journalism on the same subject.

Publications

Scapegoat

Katharine Quarmby

Every few months there’s a shocking news story about the sustained, and often fatal, abuse of a disabled person. It’s easy to write off such cases as bullying that got out of hand, terrible criminal anomalies or regrettable failures of the care system, but in fact they point to a more uncomfortable and fundamental truth about how our society treats its most unequal citizens. In Scapegoat, Katharine Quarmby looks behind the headlines to question and understand our discomfort with disabled people. Combining fascinating examples from history with tenacious investigation and powerful first person interviews, Scapegoat will change the way we think about disability – and about the changes we must make as a society to ensure that disabled people are seen as equal citizens, worthy of respect, not targets for taunting, torture and attack.

Katharine Quarmby

Publications

Scapegoat