Embracing Radical Brains

Holly Smale is the author of Geek Girl, Model Misfit, Picture Perfect and All That Glitters. She was unexpectedly spotted by a top London modelling agency at the age of fifteen and spent the following two years falling over on catwalks, going bright red and breaking things she couldn’t afford to replace. By the time Holly had graduated from Bristol University with a BA in English Literature and an MA in Shakespeare she had given up modelling and set herself on the path to becoming a writer. Geek Girl was the no. 1 bestselling young adult fiction title in the UK in 2013. It was shortlisted for several major awards including the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and the Branford Boase award, nominated for the Queen of Teen award and won the teen and young adult category of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the 11-14 category of the Leeds Book Award.

Alicja Nocon is a late-diagnosed autistic coach and mentor, and founder of Expand the Circle. Having gone through a journey of self-discovery after receiving her autism diagnosis in her 30s, she now helps late-discovered autistic and AuDHD adults make sense of who they are and work and live more authentically. As a first-generation economic immigrant with coal-mining heritage herself, Alicja is conscious of intersectionality and the impact of multiple marginalisation.
Alicja regularly participates at Autscape, the autistic conference, and writes on her blog. Her Master’s research on character strengths of autistic adults has been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Dr Louise Creechan is a Lecturer in the Literary Medical Humanities at Durham University; she is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and advocate for neurodivergent academics. She works on Victorian literature, neurodiversity studies, and the history of (not) reading. Her current project, The Legacy of the Dunce’s Hat, is concerned with identifying and tracing the pernicious legacy of the dunce’s hat as a tool for the institution of neurological normalcy. Her next book will be part memoir, part literary theory that works through examples of Victorian fiction and medical writings to interrogate the neurotypicality of the discipline. She has appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking and The Essay and is the co-host of the academic/comedy podcast, LOL My Praxis.

Onyinye Udokporo is an author, entrepreneur, educator, public speaker, and pioneer of social mobility. Onyinye is deeply passionate about education and began her tuition business Enrich Learning, aged 12. With the moral support of her parents, Onyinye began to provide the most affordable tuition in London from her parent’s living room. Having seen how education helped her climb the ladder, she was eager to give others access to the same or even better chances as her. In 2018, she won two scholarships to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing where she studied online education. Following that trip, Onyinye came back to London and independently created an online education platform and tuition centre. She recognised that there is a need for a community to be built for parents, carers, and guardians as well as students to ensure that young people and children alongside adults can have the greatest access to opportunity in the education sector.