Every autistic writer in a panellist’s workshops had been told they could not write

When Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the media panel, asked whether a reality show was the path forward for an autistic actor, a panellist took the question somewhere earlier. At the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, the panellist told the media panel that there were so many barriers, and took the question right back to writing, the story writing that drives entertainment media. It was something, the panellist said, that had come up in conversation during the break.

The panellist runs creative writing workshops for autistic people, children and adults. The people who come are amazingly creative, the panellist said, and in the current workshops the youngest participant was seven and the oldest 73. Every single one of them, the panellist said, had had a terrible experience at school, where they were told, “You can’t write. you’re not creative, you don’t do it the right way.” And they were also amazingly talented. “But we think differently and we work differently.”