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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Readers’ letters led Sandra Thom-Jones to quit her university job and write
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, the autistic writer described a book that explains autism from the inside, the letters that followed it, and fiction in which autistic characters have ordinary lives.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Sandra Thom-Jones told the media panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024 that one book had changed her life. It was the book she wrote to explain autism from the inside, and the change came from what readers did after reading it.
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the media panel, had asked each panellist about their first thought when he invited them to take part. Thom-Jones said that when she saw the list of topics she wanted to be on every panel, and when she saw that the media panel was in Sydney she decided to come to Sydney from Melbourne for it, because it was a subject she was passionate about and had researched a great deal. In her spare time, she said, she is a creative writer, and “all of my fiction has autistic characters and doing regular things.” The characters have real jobs and real lives, she said, and she thought there needed to be a lot more of that.
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Sources the story draws on
- Growing in to Autism (opens in a new tab), Melbourne University Press, listed by Simon & Schuster
- Growing in to Autism (updated edition) (opens in a new tab), Melbourne University Publishing
- Autistics at Work: A Practical Guide (opens in a new tab), Melbourne University Publishing
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