Scottish author Elle McNicoll has had her debut novel published with small publishing house Knights Of.
A Kind of Spark recently won the Waterstones children’s book prize after previously being rejected by publishers who believed no one would want to read a book about an autistic girl. The novel has since been described by Waterstones as “eye opening, heart-wrenching, sad, & inspiring.”
The story follows Addie, an 11-year-old autistic girl, as she campaigns for a memorial to the witch trials that had happened right there in her Scottish village.
The young author is autistic herself and was becoming fed up with the lack of representation and support for autistic girls and women in the literary world. In an interview for a proofreading job with Kinghts Of, McNicoll was asked if she would like to write a book with an autistic character herself, and it just so happened that she was in the middle of one at that time.
Speaking to The Guardian McNicoll said: “I’d been working on a draft for a couple of years, but I was missing the main character. As I was going to these interviews and getting more and more disheartened, Addie started to form. She was definitely born out of a kind of defiance – the more that the industry pushed back, the stronger she got.”
McNicoll wrote the character for all girls like herself. “I was a voracious reader, but I never saw the word autistic written in a book, or autistic girls. We had [Mark Haddon’s] The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but we never saw neurodivergent girls.”
As well as the £5000 Waterstones children’s book prize, A Kind of Spark has won the Blue Peter prize for best story, and named Blackwell’s book of 2020.
McNicoll called her recent award win “completely staggering” and stated “I will never say ‘I can’t’ again.”
New Children’s Book Reveals the Black History of the UK
Roald Dahl Estate Announces ‘Wonka’ Tie-in Novel
Harry Potter Book Purchased for 30p Sells for £10,500
Harry Potter Books to be made into new TV series
