writer, speaker, advocate
Let’s Go Play in the Bomb Buildings: A Welsh Girlhood
Wheatley peers beneath the surface of war-time Wales and reveals a childhood of bombed houses and streets in home-town Swansea, rationing into the mid-fifties, and austerity. Yet girls were wonderfully free to play outside, make dens, have play fights and explore their sexuality. We follow the little girls as they mature and go on to grammar school for girls. A battle erupts when the author decides to speak Welsh. . . Humorous, powerful, compassionate.
The Girls of Priory Hall
Based on Wheatley's experience teaching in an exclusive girls' boarding-school in the Eastern Townships, Quebec, in the 1960's. The young heroine is drawn into a secret passionate affair with an older woman on staff, and her illusions about love, sex, and the lives of the elite are challenged to a dramatic devastating ending.
Tamarind Sky
"a remarkable first novel, epic in its sweep. . .a full spectrum of wisdom, horror, and delight."
- Cecelia Frey, award-winning Canadian author of Lovers Fall Back To Earth.
When British white immigrant Selena Jones meets Aidan Gilmor, a Eurasian from Sri Lanka - half British, half Sinhalese - in Toronto in the 1960's, a dramatic clash of cultures evolves that resonates even today. Selena learns not only to face the racism against her engendered by her "mixed" marriage - as it was called - but a deeper understanding of her Sinhalese-Eurasian in-laws, in particular of her father-in-law, a former elite tea planter in British colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), who is "as white as an Englishman." She comes to understand the full significance of being of "mixed race", and of her father-in-law's personal secret guilt concerning the events and horror of the past. . . .
And Neither
Have I Wings to Fly
AWARDS:
Short-listed for the Wales Book of the Year Award, 2014
Bronze Medal for Creative Non-Fiction, , Independent Publishers Awards North America, 2014.
MEDIA Award, Protective Services of Ontario, Canada. 2014.
An important expose of the segregation, neglect, and abuse of those with intellectual disabilities in the Huronia Regional Centre, as seen through the eyes of former patient Daisy Lumsden ...
My Sad is All Gone
The true story of Wheatley’s autistic son, Julian, and his struggle with violence and self-mutilation.
