‘The State of Me’ (2008) is an expression of the illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – erroneously labelled as CFS – through fiction. I’ve been ill since I was an undergraduate at Glasgow University in 1980s. (My illness was triggered by the Coxsackie virus, there was an outbreak in the west of Scotland at the time. I’m glad I didn’t have a crystal ball to see what havoc this virus would wreak. I had just gone to live in France and had to come home, I was so ill.) The novel is, I hope, the antithesis of ‘sick-lit’, and is my weapon against the ignorance that prevails. I occasionally write short stories and was shortlisted for the Asham Award (2001), the RLS Award (2005), the Bridport Short Story Prize (2011) and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize (2012). In 2012, I appeared in a BBC Alba documentary, ‘Toxic Tiredness’, in which I discuss the book and the illness (the consultant neurologist who diagnosed me with ME in 1984 also appears). In 2013, I read at ‘Dissecting Edinburgh’, a Medicine and Literature event at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. I was also invited to a Medical Humanities book group to discuss the novel with medical students. In early 2014, I had a short story in ‘The Write Stuff’ feature in the Scotsman, and later in the year I had flash fiction in Issue 5 of The Istanbul Review.
‘The amazing feat of this novel is to give one a physical sense of the pain and frustration of this condition, and yet to be bouncing with life, the inner life and the irrepressible psyche of Helen.’ – Elizabeth Baines, author of ‘The Birth Machine’ and ‘Too Many Magpies’
 | Nasim Marie JafryNasim Marie Jafry was born in the west of Scotland to a Scottish mother and Pakistani father. She has an MA and MSc from Glasgow University but her studies were severely disrupted when she became ill with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in the 1980s. She is passionate about educating the public about this poorly understood illness. Her semi-autobiographical novel The State of Me was published by HarperCollins in 2008. She has had short stories in various Scottish literary magazines, and was shortlisted for the Asham Award (2001), the RLS Award (2005), the Bridport Short Story Prize (2011) and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize (2012). She appeared in a BBC Alba documentary in 2012 in which she discussed her novel and her illness, and in 2013 she read at “Dissecting Edinburgh”, a Medicine and Literature event at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. She had a short story in The Write Stuff feature in The Scotsman in early 2014, and flash fiction in The Istanbul Review in summer 2014. She was longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2016. Her blog can be found at velo-gubbed-legs.blogspot.com and she tweets as @velogubbed. She lives in Edinburgh. |