Dinah Karen Crawshay Murray (27 May 1946 – 7 July 2021) was a writer, educator and campaigner for autistic people. She collaborated in developing the theory of monotropism as a way of explaining autism in terms of a tendency to focus intensely on a subject.
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Early life
Murray was born in Hampstead, London, the daughter of Labour Party politician, Tony Greenwood, who was a member of Harold Wilson's cabinet. Her mother Jill Greenwood, was a writer who created and illustrated the pamphlet Make Do and Mend, published during World War II, and was co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Murray's godfather was the Labour Prime Minister of the time, Clement Attlee. Murray attended Byron House school in Highgate and the North London Collegiate School. She worked for Penguin Books as a copy editor before attending University College London, where she earned a degree in Linguistics and Anthropology in 1969.
Career
Murray was autistic, and spent most of her career researching, campaigning and working with autistic individuals. She went on to gain a PhD in linguistics from University College London in 1986. She was a tutor at Birmingham University's distance learning course on autism, WebAutism, from 1996 to 2013.
In the 1990s she was a community support worker in London, an experience which led her to found APANA (Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse), highlighting the overuse of tranquillisers given to intellectually disabled people.