Jill Dawson is a celebrated British novelist. Her fourth novel, Wild
Boy, deals with the true case of the discovery of a feral child in
19th century France, a boy whom the 20th century neurologist Uta Frith
claimed was the first recorded case of autism. For this book Dawson
was nominated for a British Academy Book Award, (given for a book
that makes scholarly ideas accessible). Her fifth and most recent
novel, Watch Me Disappear (long-listed for the Orange Prize) deals
with a young woman who is ‘seeing’ things, terrible dream-like
visions involving the death of a child, and is unsure whether it is
her epileptic condition which is producing the visions, or whether
she should trust them. Dawson is interested in neurology, notions
of disability, psycho-analysis, hypnosis and the supernatural and
where these areas might collide.
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