Christoph Keller

Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angry book, it's a very funny one ... compelling and unsettling. The tension between Keller's intellect and his physical weakness courses through the writing ...Yet his gripe is not with his own physical limitations ... Keller is asking us to consider whether it is disability that is the problem, or whether it is a society that insists on seeing people with disabilities that way

A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero lingers long in the memory after its final page

A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny

Joanne Limburg, author of Letters to My Weird Sisters

What is it like to have a 'wasting' disease? In Every Cripple a Superhero, the excellence of Christoph Keller's writing is matched by its fearlessness. Precision, tragicomedy, quiet rage, elegant storytelling; every awkwardness, every frustration, every terror, every abjection is illuminated by the superpower of his style. No word or phrase is wasted in this marvellous book. And by the way, it is also a love story

Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021 and author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019

An eye-opener regarding the everyday obstacles the author has to overcome when negotiating his local environment. The passage describing the absurd, insulting, and tragi-comic experience of visiting an award-winning new building and finding the only way to enter by wheelchair is via a remote corner of the building should be compulsory reading for anyone aiming to design inclusive spaces

Laura Vaughan, Professor of Urban Form and Society, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

Shocking ... Keller's humor is quiet and sophisticated, melancholic and sarcastic, wide awake and always open to the unexpectedly beautiful ... [his] book has a lightness that brings tears to your eyes

Everyone who doesn't use a wheelchair, and everyone who does, should read Christoph Keller's Every Cripple A Superhero. So many worlds exist side-by-side, yet we seldom truly enter the experience of another. Grace, strength, and humor are superpowers of extraordinary depth and stature, and Keller's slender, powerful book glows like a supernova

Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell and Lark and Termite

Explosive and moving, the book also has a real capacity to open the eyes of readers and to change attitudes

Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers

Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. 
 
Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Christoph Keller

Praise for Every Cripple a Superhero

Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angr ...

A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero < ...

A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny

Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angr ...

A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero < ...

A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny

Fascinating ... [The book is] a series of snapshots, anecdotes, poems and short stories about what it is to be disabled in a world that isn't very interested in accommodating disability. This isn't an angr ...

A defiant call to arms ... angry and funny in equal measure ... [Keller's life story is] enough to move any reader to remove dust from their proverbial eye ... moving ... Every Cripple a Superhero < ...

A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny

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