I was disappointed to read Paul Wilson's top 10 books about disability – what a missed opportunity. One of the slogans of the disability rights movement is "Nothing About Us Without Us" - and there was very little "us" in last week's selection.

Since Aristotle, characters with disabilities have appeared in western drama and impairment has long been used in fiction as a metaphor for mortality, evil, pity – the human condition. However, few of the writers have been disabled themselves, and although I don't believe you have to experience something in order to write about it (I'm a female playwright who writes male characters), a selection that favours books written by non-disabled writers misses far too much.

Many depictions of disabled characters are outdated, incorrect, and far from the reality of living with a physical, sensory, or intellectual impairment. They are invariably rooted in social norms, defining (and often devaluing) the individual according to their medical diagnosis. Apart from the frustration of such limiting characterisation, and inaccuracies being peddled as truth, there is another, more sinister trend – the rising incidence of disability hate crime. Disabled investigative journalist Katherine Quarmby's eye-opening Scapegoat: Why We are Failing Disabled People is a timely study of the root causes of violent crime against people who are "different", a sobering wake-up to western society's ingrained prejudices and our limited definition of what is "normal".

Which is another good reason for exploring work written from within difference rather than outside it. Writers who embrace a disability identity, and the unique perspective their impairment or condition gives them, can radically change other worldviews, too. Anne Finger's Call Me Ahab (University of Nebraska Press) is a fantastic collection of stories, reinventing the lives of figures from art and literature we think we know: Vincent van Gogh holed up in a New York hotel, surviving on food stamps; Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo merging as one in a Hollywood flick …. It's a prose "crip" version of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife with the same wit and verve, but it goes further, challenging how we understand and look at our own and other bodies.

Or how about Clare Allan's multi-award winning Poppy Shakespeare, brilliantly subverting notions of sanity as she terrifyingly dismantles our mental health system? Informed by her 10 years in a mental health unit, she explodes the myth of the madwoman in the attic, revealing how we are complicit in our society's social constructs. Such work is illuminating, making me perceive existence in a different way.

Characters with different perspectives have been fashionable for years, usually those with intellectual impairments, or who are on the spectrum. How extraordinary, then, to engage with such material, not from an outsider's imagined posturing, but from the embodied experience of being in a disabling world?

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison (Ebury), Daniel Tammet's memoir Born on a Blue Day or almost anything written by Donna Williams will bring more clarity and revelation than any Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time ever could. Temple Grandin's extraordinary Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behaviour is a prime example of how radical this work can be. As professor of animal science at Colorado State University, she uses her autism to empathise with and understand how animals feel.

And there are so many more – "Poet of cripples" Jim Ferris's The Hospital Poems (Main Street Rag), Christopher Nolan's Dam-Burst of Dreams (Littlehampton Book Services), Terry Galloway's acerbic Mean Little Deaf Queer (Beacon Press), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northern … I could go on and on. But what books would you suggest?