Katie Roberts

Katie Roberts (b. 2004) is a poet from the UK. She channels her creativity through writing, often reflecting on her lived experience with illness.

I got sick with ME only a month after turning 13, and I have been bed-bound since I was 15. At the moment, my illness is severe, sometimes worse. I am bed-bound and unable to walk or sit upright, yet I have improved enough to tolerate screen time and do some crafting. So different from the years only able to lie flat in bed, in the dark and silence.

I am grateful for that improvement, yet life is still so different to how it was. I was active and loved to do many sports, I enjoyed school and seeing friends. Now my friends are almost all online, and I don’t talk to the ones I had. I am tube fed, have to use a reclining electric wheelchair if I am out of bed and a hoist to transfer into it. I can’t see family often or spend time with them. My days are clouded with symptoms.

But I have found things that help and new meaning in my life. This ranges from selling handmade greeting cards from bed to advocating, and one of the ways I have done that creatively is writing poetry. This is what I am sharing in my exhibition, it is poetry about my experiences of ME. It has helped me cope and learn to live with my life as well as express the experience of it.

I have raised awareness and found a community of incredible people.

— Katie Roberts, 2025