In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

The Raging Grace anthology is an outcome of Andy Jackson’s Writing the Future of Health Fellowship at RMIT University. Jackson’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winning collection Human Looking (2021) brought the poetic study of disability to a national audience. Raging Grace, which he co-edited with Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying, extends that project. A kind of summit for writers with a disability, neurodivergent writers, and/or writers with chronic pain, it appears at an inflection point for attitudes towards disability in Australia. The 2023 review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), while identifying shortcomings in the taxpayer-funded scheme, has also led to contentious policy changes, and a troubling public perception of participants as wasteful – even fraudulent – spenders. Those participants risk becoming scapegoats for lax government oversight. As debates over the scheme roil, the persons it supports lose visibility, humanity – lose the ‘genuine voice’ on which, Jackson argues, the ‘future of health’ for disabled people depends.