Lehrer's Golem Girl wins inaugural Barbellion Prize

The inaugural Barbellion Prize for ill and disabled voices in writing has been won by artist and author Riva Lehrer for Golem Girl: A Memoir (Virago).

Launched last year by writer Jake Goldsmith, the £1,000 prize is awarded annually to an author whose work "effectively communicates the experience of chronic illness and/or disability". Named in tribute to English diarist W N P Barbellion, who wrote about his life with multiple sclerosis before his death in 1919, it is open to work of any genre.

Golem Girl shares with readers Lehrer’s experiences as an artist who was born with disabilities into a world that is challenged by difference. Judges praised it as “a brilliant social account of the history of disability, worthy of all its praise, and an estimable celebration of art and disabled life”.

Lehrer, an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on issues of physical identity and the socially challenged body, said: “I woke up this morning and learned that my memoir, Golem Girl, had won The Barbellion Prize. What an appropriate time to hear the results of the award, with the dawn of a new era.

“The Barbellion Prize is helping inaugurate a new era for disability culture; one in which we're not shoved to the margins of 'specialdom', but take our place among our cultural peers, and to create a more equal world through art. Thank you so much for choosing Golem Girl as the debut representative of your vision.”

The shortlist for the prize featured The Fragments of My Father: A Memoir of Madness, Love and Being a Carer by Sam Mills (Fourth Estate), Sanatorium by Abi Palmer (Penned in the Margins) and Kika & Me by Amit Patel (Pan Macmillan).

Goldsmith said: “Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer has been chosen from an already amazing shortlist, as well as a choice longlist. One that shows the depth and variety of what can be offered from literature that represents disability. Riva’s work deserves all its celebration.”