Jim Pollard
When it comes to writing about the real lives of disabled people and health issues it simply doesn’t get any better than Jim’s work – he keeps it real, often funny and always simple.
Jim is passionate about:
- Readable writing
- Empowering information
- Enabling design
Writer and editor Jim Pollard is the team’s wordsmith. He’s been writing accessible, acclaimed copy on disability and health issues for twenty years for everyone from the Department of Health to The Observer. He has taken in a fair selection of the UK’s leading not-for-profits on the way. As the former editor of Arthritis News, then the UK’s largest circulation disability title, he is one of the very few people who knows how to wring copy out of Kate.
He was the relaunch editor for New Bulletin at Radar and is their writer for the organisation’s Doing Life Differently, a series of publications that has changed the way material for disabled people is conceived and written.
His journalism, books and websites – he is currently editor of malehealth.co.uk - have all been commended for or shortlisted for awards and prizes. While his books for children and adults are mostly about health, they do include the novel Rotten In Denmark, a sex and drugs and rock and roll mystery, of which he is still absurdly proud.
Jim’s interest in men’s health developed when he had cancer and wrote a book, All Right Mate based on the experience. His most recent book The User’s Guide To The Male Body was highly commended by both the Medical Journalists’ Association and the British Medical Association – two groups who rarely agree on much.
Jim, who edited KNA’s ‘Ultimate People Networks: A practical guide to Disabled Employee Networks’, believes the principles of good communication - simplicity and clarity – can be applied regardless of the complexity of the subject-matter. He likes to say ‘it’s not rocket science’ although when he was working for the European Space Agency, it actually was rocket science. He’d be very happy to help with anything your network might be producing.
Despite the regular nominations Jim has only actually once won anything (editor of the Royal Society of Medicine’s website of the year), the perfect professional accompaniment to a life sentence in disappointment as a Tottenham Hotspur supporter.
