Cerrie Burnell

Claire "Cerrie" Burnell (born 30 August 1979)

Early and personal life Burnell's mother is a dance teacher, and her father is a telecoms manager. She has one younger brother, John. She was originally named Claire but started asking people to call her "Cerrie" at the age of 10.

Burnell was born with her right arm ending slightly below the elbow. Her parents encouraged her to wear a prosthetic arm, but she resisted from the start and stopped wearing one entirely when she was nine.

Burnell has a daughter, Amelie, born in 2008, but had been a single mother from early in the pregnancy. She has performed in theatre in the UK, where she received favourable reviews, and in Brazil with the CTORio Political Theatre Company. Grange Hill, The Bill, and Comedy Lab. She starred in The First to Go by Nabil Shaban, about the "Disabled Holocaust" in Nazi Germany, playing the part of Brunhilde, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in 2008. Besides acting, she has worked as a teaching assistant in a special needs school. She, the BBC, and multiple disability groups stated that the problem was actually the prejudices of the parents projected onto the children.

Author Burnell's children's book, Snowflakes , was published by Scholastic Corporation in September 2013. It is about a mixed-race girl from the city sent to live with her grandmother in a magical village and was inspired by Burnell's daughter, who is also mixed-race.

In 2016, Burnell wrote another children's book titled Harper and the Sea of Secrets for World Book Day which was sold at bookshops and supermarkets for £1 or free with a Book Day token from the end of February that year. This book was aimed at Key Stage 2 pupils (ages 7–11). Once again, this book was published by Scholastic.

I Am Not a Label: 34 disabled artists, thinkers, athletes and activists from past and present, an illustrated anthology of biographies for children, illustrated by Lauren Baldo, was published by Wide Eyed Editions in 2020.

In 2022, Burnell's children's novel Wilder Than Midnight, published by Puffin, was shortlisted for The Adrien Prize.