Cures and Curses - by Beth O'Brien (Hardcover)

About the Book

A collection of folk tales that celebrates the wide-ranging disability representation and surprising nuance in traditional folk stories.

Book Synopsis

Whether it is a curse that needs breaking, a punishment inflicted, or an underdog fighting the odds, disability is so much a part of folklore that we can easily overlook it.

Cures and Curses brings disabled characters to the fore in a collection of folk tales that celebrates the wide-ranging disability representation and surprising nuance in traditional folk stories. Accompanying the stories is a discussion about how disability is represented in folklore.

About the Author

Beth O'Brien has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham where she studied disability representation in fairy tales and their retellings. Her debut novel, Wolf Siren, won the Carnegie Medal for Writing 2026 and her second novel, Feather Vane, is out now. She is the founder and editor of Disabled Tales, a website dedicated to exploring the representation of disability in folk and fairy tales. Her forthcoming academic work includes a chapter on disability, Disney, and Medieval history and a co-authored chapter on disability for the Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Folklore. She has appeared at many events as a speaker on the subject of disability in traditional tales.