Marc Bratcher

Marc was born in 1972 with cerebral palsy. When he was very young he used a walking frame to get around but mostly crawled for the first 10 years of his life. Crawling through the house and garden, Marc had a very unique perspective on nature and he world around him and his many adventures helped shape his imagination. 

His greatest influences however were the books his dad read to him from the age of 6-9, such as The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and as he grew up the films of Walt Disney and later Steven Spielberg were also very important to him. In 1991 Marc gained a place at Oxford University to read Modern History, where, by his own admission, he spent far too much time on the river ‘messing about in boats’, reading and writing stories. Since then he has been in a powered wheelchair all his life, but rather than seeing it has a form of limitation he has always seen it has a vehicle of liberation. It’s just a pity that real wheelchairs have so few gadgets, he always says, because, as in his stories, with just a little burst of imagination they could (and should) be as cool as Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang (or James Bond’s Aston Martin). He has always written for pleasure and has had, in his words, the most unexpected and biggest adventure of all, that of marriage and raising a family of his own.