Bethany Handley
Award Winning Writer, Poet and Disability Activist
Bethany campaigns for Disabled people’s rights and for better access to nature for all.
Bethany is an Ambassador for Country Living’s Access for All campaign, for Wales Coast Path and for Ramblers Cymru. Bethany was named one of the ten most influential disabled people working in politics, law and media in the UK, and one of the 100 most influential disabled individuals in the UK in the Shaw Trust’s Disability Power 100.
Her debut poetry pamphlet Cling Film will be published by Seren in February 2025 and she co-edited Beyond / Tu Hwnt, the Anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled Writers.
Her writing and/ or activism has been featured by BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Wales, BBC One News, BBC Wales, Metro, and the Poetry Foundation amongst others, and published by magazines including POETRY, Poetry Wales, Buzz Magazine, The Welsh Agenda and Country Living. She has worked with organisations including Forestry England and Plantlife to promote access.
She can usually be found in/ near the sea or wheeling through a forest with her dog Monty.
Cling Film
Cling Film explores existing as a young Disabled woman in a crossfire of ableism. She invites the reader to travel in her skin, exposing the barriers that disable people with unfiltered honesty.
A deep connection to nature is ever present in these poems. Swifts wheel across the sky, acorn shells crunch beneath tread, waves break against the shore and a wheelchair user leaves proud tyre tracks in the sand. Set in familiar Welsh places – from Cardiff’s Heath Hospital to Mynydd Mawr in Eryri, these witty, perceptive poems challenge myths about disability in ways that are striking, astute and devastatingly exact.
Named one of the 40 best books, films and events of 2025 by Country Living.
The Cyborg Jillian Weise
“These poems are, apparently, for me because I laughed for an hour alongside Bethany Handley and, while I was laughing, I forgot about my pain.”
Owen Sheers
“With these crafted, unflinching poems, deftly calibrated between rage, humour, pain and joy, Bethany Hughes opens our eyes and minds to new ways of seeing and being. A bold, urgent and gifted new voice in Welsh poetry.”
Kim Moore
“Cling Film holds up to the white light of the page the multi-layered micro-aggressions of ableism and asks us as individuals and as a society to do better – be careful, these poems will change the way you see the world.”
Kaite O’Reilly
“Innovative, subversive, filled with wit and rage, these poems resist and reframe ableist tropes, offering an alternative, politicised perspective with warmth and grace. This is the collection I've been waiting years for.”
Beyond / Tu Hwnt
Edited by Bethany Handley, Megan Angharad Hunter and Sioned Erin Hughes, Beyond is a radical, communities uniting anthology of fiction, non-fiction and poetry by some of Wales' best Deaf and Disabled writers. Order your copy now from Lucent Dreaming or any local bookshop.
Mae Tu Hwnt yn gasgliad radicalaidd o waith sydd wedi'i wreiddio mewn cymuned ac undod. Dyma gyfuniad o waith ffuglen, ffeithiol a barddoniaeth gan rai o awduron a beirdd Byddar ac Anabl gorau Cymru. Archebwch eich copi nawr o Lucent Dreaming, neu unrhyw un o'ch siopau llyfrau lleol.
#AccessForAll
Bethany campaigns for access for all and is Country Living’s #AccessForAll Ambassador.
Poem for International Wheelchair Day
Country Living commissioned this poem, ‘I’m not advocating for all beauty spots to be tarmacked.’
Reading at the Southbank Centre as part of London Literature Festival
Bethany reads her award wining essay ‘The National Trust’s Bomb Disposal Squad’ at London Literature Festival as part of Creative Future’s Writers’ Award Showcase 2023.