Bethany Handley
Bethany Handley is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist from Monmouthshire, South Wales. Bethany campaigns for Disabled people’s rights and for better access to nature for all.
IG: @bethanyhandley_
Biography
Bethany Handley is a prize-winning writer, poet and disability activist from Monmouthshire, South Wales, who campaigns for Disabled people’s rights and for better access to nature for all. Her first book of poetry, CLING FILM, published with Seren in 2025.
Bethany is an ambassador for Country Living’s ‘Access for All’ campaign, for Wales Coast Path and Ramblers Cymru. She was named one of the 100 most influential Disabled individuals in the UK in the Shaw Trust’s Disability Power 100. Her work has been featured by Country Living, BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Wales, BBC News, Nation.Cymru, WalesOnline, Metro, POETRY, Poetry Wales, The Welsh Agenda, Buzz Magazine, Spelt, Walk magazine and on the Poetry Foundation, amongst others.
Bethany is one of the writers on Literature Wales’ Representing Wales 2023-24. She ran a writing retreat and mentorship scheme for Welsh Deaf and Disabled writers. Alongside authors Megan Angharad Hunter and Sioned Erin Hughes, Bethany edited the first bilingual anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled writers, BEYOND/TU HWNT, which published in 2025 with Lucent Dreaming.
Bethany has worked with many media and third sector organisations to promote the social model of disability and to challenge the barriers Disabled people continue to experience. Bethany is available for disability awareness training, as a keynote speaker, a consultant and as a creative workshop facilitator for all ages.
Awards Bethany has been nominated for or won include:
Pushcart Prize Nominee (2023)
Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Poetry Award Shortlistee (2024)
Creative Future Writer’s Award Gold Prize Winner (2023)
Nine Arches Press Primers Finalist (2023)
Books
Bethany Handley’s debut poetry, CLING FILM, published in 2025 with Seren and explores existing as a young Disabled woman within a crossfire of ableism by way of formally inventive lyricism and familiar Welsh places.
Praise for CLING FILM:
‘With these crafted, unflinching poems, deftly calibrated between rage, humour, pain and joy, Bethany Handley opens our eyes and minds to new ways of seeing and being. A bold, urgent and gifted new voice in Welsh poetry.’ – Owen Sheers, author of Skirrid Hill
‘A breathtakingly raw and beautiful collection’ – Connor Allen, Children’s Laureate for Wales 2021–2023
‘Be careful, these poems will change the way you see the world’ –Kim Moore, Forward Prize-winning author of All the Men I Never Married
‘I laughed for an hour alongside Bethany Handley and, while I was laughing, I forgot about my pain.’ – The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Common Cyborg
‘For anyone who values life’ – Joshua Jones, author of Local Fires
‘This is the collection I've been waiting years for’ – Kaite O’Reilly, FRSL, Ted Hughes Award-winning playwright
‘Witty, surreal, razor-sharp, joyful, scathing, celebratory and unsparing … Glorious, necessary reading’ – Polly Atkin, FRSL, author of Some of Us Just Fall