I started writing A Sign of Her Own after reading about the deaf pupils of Alexander Graham Bell. I had grown up deaf myself, using hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate. I also had deaf and hard-of-hearing family members. Nonetheless I’d often felt on the edge of the Deaf world as well as the Hearing world because I didn’t know British Sign Language. When I came across Bell’s deaf pupils, I was instantly drawn to them. Perhaps it was his attempts to fashion them into hearing people, in spite of the fact that they couldn’t actually hear, that chimed with my lifetime’s experience of audiology and medical appointments.
By this point, I had been writing for several years. A few failed starts at novels and
