Read Of The Week (Dec 11 to Dec 17)

'I am the mother of a child who did not fit the school system, a child who was disabled by it. She was a child who made “errors”, “mistakes” that the school system was unforgiving of. We were told by the principal of an alternative school that they could not possibly admit “this kind of child”. My daughter went from being a child to “this kind of child” in that one moment.’

When she started working on the book, it was Srilata’s daughter who was its protagonist. But soon, she realised that there was no way she could stop with her daughter’s story. With each step ahead (or back), she became acutely aware of the larger story of the things we frame as ‘disability’.

In This Kind of Child, Srilata brings together first-person accounts, interviews, and short fiction, which open up for us the experiential worlds of persons with disabilities and those who love them. The book offers a multi-perspective understanding of the disability experience — its emotional as well as imagined truth, both to the disabled themselves as well as to those closely associated with them.

K Srilata is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic. Her novel Table for Four was longlisted in 2009 for the Man Asian Literary Prize.