Michael Theo said his book with an autistic hero is for every child

An audience member who works in children’s publishing put a problem to the panel at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025, drawn from inside that industry. The questioner began by telling Michael Theo how thrilled they were that he was writing a children’s book with an autistic protagonist, asking “where was a book like that when I was 9 years old?” Then they described the risk such a book faces. When a creative work has an autistic main character, or a non-binary character, or a protagonist who is a person of colour or from any other minority, it tends to be pigeonholed as written for that group, so that a book with an autistic hero becomes a book for autistic children to see themselves in. That is true, the questioner said, but “the book is for everybody”. They asked what the panel thought needed to change for books, films and television with minority protagonists to be picked up and treated as standard.

Theo had mentioned the book earlier in the session. He said he was writing it with Scholastic, that it was about a nine year old boy on the spectrum, and that he had plans to write more. He could not give much detail before publication. They had only just found an illustrator, he said, and illustration takes months.