Seeing is believing and so is hearing, too. I guess.

Speech teacher James Leeds (William Hurt) runs his class the way he wants to and the kids love him for that. However, his world one day is all mixed up when he meets a deaf custodian, Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), and takes his world by storm, allowing for him to not just find love unlike ever before, but hope and happiness, too. As well, of course, anger, too.

It’s hard to do a movie about people with disabilities, as you can sometimes tell when a writer/director is sneering at those less fortunate then them. At the same time, however, it’s also hard to do them justice without ever making people with disabilities seem as if they are ungodly-like saints that Christ himself would have christened, had he the chance to do so. After all, they’re just like you or I, normal…

by Kavita Bhanot

Since the recent failure of World Book Night to include any writers of colour in its 2015 list, there has been a fresh bout of conversation about the need for more ‘diversity’ in the literature that is published and awarded in Britain, as well as amongst those working in publishing.

Alongside a series of Guardian articles, there has been a call for contributions to Nikesh Shukla’s crowd-funded anthology on race and immigration (in itself a great idea); writers of colour have been invited to come forward, to contact Shukla. #diversedecember, a twitter initiative set up by bloggers Naomi Frisby and Dan Lipscombe, has been encouraging people to ‘read with diversity’ and share the ‘diverse’ books that they are reading. Many organisations and individuals, readers and writers, are joining in to help bring more ‘diversity’ to publishing.

To whom is all this directed? Who should read more ‘diverse’…