Dinah Murray

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. 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. She contributed to an online communications technology application, AutNav, which achieved funding from Scottish Autism just before she died.

Personal life In 1970, she married David Murray, a philosopher and music critic, who died in 2016. They had three children of their own, as well as a foster child. After the 2019 United Kingdom general election returned a Conservative majority, she moved to Dalgety Bay in Fife, Scotland.