Cerebral palsy meant Irish writer Christopher Nolan, who has died aged 43, could neither speak nor control his hands.
His parents and elder sister, however, helped him, when he was 11, with an ingenious typing system, and the words bubbling in his mind were uncorked. He soon had enough material for a first book, Dam-Burst of Dreams (1981).
Nolan gave the rest of his life to writing. In Under the Eye of the Clock (1987) he described his own life; another 10 years' effort brought a substantial saga, The Banyan Tree (1999), drawing on some of his family's history as small-time farmers. His father, Joseph, partly worked as a psychiatric nurse and on the land in Mullingar, County Westmeath, where Nolan was born.
He had been awkwardly positioned in the womb; efforts to adjust this caused a loss of vital oxygen. Although his brain was damaged, Nolan would not remain the perpetual infant that one doctor dismayingly predicted. As Nolan later wrote, he composed poems in his mind at three. He thought his father was at heart a storyteller and wrote of farm life that ''everything emanates from the kindly kitchen'' run by his mother, Bernadette, who realised in 1971 that they needed to move into Dublin for his sake.
After attending the Central Remedial Clinic school, Nolan went to Mt Temple Comprehensive. Other pupils, assuming he could not understand them, sneered, and one boy let the air out of his wheelchair's tyres. The teacher asked Nolan to indicate the suspect by a nod. She then improvised a classroom trial; when the jury could not agree, the miscreant settled matters by getting a pump and a friendship was born.
After considerable struggle, partly eased by newly available Lioresal tablets, he could use a pointer strapped to his forehead his ''unicorn''. While this tapped at a typewriter, his mother held his head. As he put it, he now ''gimleted his words into white sheets of life'', which was ''a glorious bountiful nightmare''.
After local publicity, his story was picked up by the BBC and the Sunday Times. Lord Snowdon photographed him, and a judge for a literary contest organised by the Spastics Society (which in 1994 became Scope: for People with Cerebral Palsy), Edna Healey, said his poetry ''was the high spot of my year''.
Dam-Burst of Dreams followed. It included poems, letters, notebook entries, stories, a short play and an autobiographical fragment. His mother commented that they were ''meant to give aural pleasure. I discovered that truth each time he begged me to read over and over again the sentence which he had just typed, while he sat, head averted, listening intently to the sounds and effects of his words''.
Considerable publicity was gratifying and fatiguing. One American journalist insinuated that Nolan had a ghost writer. Disgusted, brooding, he asked his father, while out, to take him inside a church. In front of a lifesize crucifix, he swung his left arm in a two-fingered gesture.
He began studying at Trinity College, Dublin, but left to work on Under the Eye of the Clock. An exultant advance upon his first book, it won the 1987 Whitbread Prize. It is a classic autobiography and was adapted as a play.
Although The Banyan Tree seemed more muted than his earlier work, this farming saga's strength has now become apparent; rich in adjectives, it should be savoured for such detail as a second twin's ''adder-like'' birth.
At work on a new novel, he died suddenly. His tremendous legacy of hope inspired stadium rockers U2's Miracle Drug (2004). Another song, however, encapsulates his great humour: he relished Nancy Sinatra's version of These Boots are Made for Walkin'. He is survived by his parents and sister. Guardian