Moving from “the Realm of Hospital Room to the Realm of Political Minority”: Ever Dundas’ HellSans and the Radical Contemporary Disabili

In 2019, the celebrated Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky described his new book Deaf Republic as being rooted in the thinking of prominent disability scholar Rosemary Garland-Thompson. As part of an interview for that year's T. S. Eliot Prize, for which Deaf Republic was shortlisted, Kaminsky quoted Garland-Thompson's call in her book Extraordinary Bodies for "the disabled body [to] move from the realm of the hospital room to the realm of political minority". This article argues that within contemporary Scottish literature, an example of this movement in action is the work of the queer crip activist and writer Ever Dundas. Set in a dystopian near-future, Dundas' 2022 novel HellSans makes disability itself the central conceit of a novel which presents a society divided up into groups, those who are and are not make sick by the use of a particular font in government advertising. The article interrogates how Dundas challenges established ideas regarding the "good disabled", while rooting the novel in radical artistic traditions in which disability itself is harnessed as an act of resistance.