Tetraplegic The Times writer Melanie Reid, who broke her neck and back in a horseriding accident six years ago, has been appointed MBE.

Reid, who lives near Stirling in Scotland, was named in the June 11 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to journalism and people with disabilities.

Her award-winning Spinal Column appears in The Times Magazine each Saturday.

Reid’s extraordinary life-affirming response to her disability, sometimes painfully frank but always wry and self-deprecating, has gained her a legion of fans around the world.

Recognition in the honours list was important, she believed, not for her sake but for the people she had come to represent.

She said:

I like the MBE because it is what ordinary people get, it’s for the little guy. I offer one of the few mainstream voices to the hidden army of the chronically ill and disabled.”