Diana Holbourn

BA History and Sociology, 1989

I look back on my time at university with fondness. As a blind person, I had extra challenges, but I found Warwick to be a friendly and supportive environment. There was a group of volunteers who read course material onto tape for me so it was accessible to me, and extra power points and bookshelves were put in my room, the former for the electronic equipment with synthetic speech I used to write essays on, and the latter for some braille books, which are a lot bigger and bulkier than print books. I'm grateful to the university for organising those things.

I found the course interesting, and I made some good supportive friends. I recently became an author. As a blind person, there were a few things I naturally had to do in a different way from the norm, such as typing my books on a computer with synthetic speech so it reads what I type out loud to me and enables me to use the Internet and email.

My books all have the same main character, a child genius called Becky Bexley. The first is a zany children's comedy called The Early Life of Becky Bexley the Child Genius, where she does unrealistically remarkable things and gets up to mischief, and the others are part of a young adult fiction series called Becky Bexley the Child Genius, where Becky gets involved in a lot of fun, and also helps adults and other people around her overcome mental health and other problems, using genuine therapy techniques.