Absolutely delighted to be at The Coast is Queer this coming weekend. If you love books, Brighton and queerness this is just the place for you.

With less than a week to go, this is the final call to join us for three days of celebrations of the best LGBTQ+ writing and writers at our fabulous home for 2022, the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in Brighton!
I am featuring in the speculative fiction panel with amazing company and writers whose books I love!

PANEL: SPECULATIVE FICTION WITH JULIA ARMFIELD, LEONE ROSS, HELEN TREVORROW, AND SHOLA VON REINHOLD

Sunday 9th October 12.15-1.30pm

Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts 

There are tickets remaining so check them out (there are pay what you can tix still available) and hope to see you there… https://coastisqueer.com/day-tickets-full-festival-pass/

Here’s the line up:

With Ursula K Le Guin challenging the gender binary as early as the 1960s, speculative fiction has been pushing society’s boundaries in a way no other genre has been free to do. It is the literature of questions, of challenges and imagination starring characters who define and redefine genders, sexualities, identities and so much else in between. Join SF royalty, Julia Armfield, Leone Ross, Helen Trevorrow and Shola von Reinhold, as they consider how changing the laws of what’s real or possible in speculative fiction worlds can help us all interact with our own unpredictable world with ever more open minds and open hearts. This panel will be chaired by Simon Richardson.

Julia Armfield was born in London in 1990. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2019. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review short story prize 2018. Her first book, salt slow, was a collection of short stories about bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of its characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession and love. She won the Pushcart Prize in 2020. Our Wives Under the Sea is Julia’s debut Novel.

Helen Trevorrow is a writer based in Brighton. She is a graduate of the Faber Academy. Her first novel, In The Wake is a feminist crime thriller that explores sexuality, family and alcoholism. Her second novel, New Brighton is a speculative thriller set in a dystopian near-future. Both novels feature queer protagonists. Helen loves 1980s sci-fi movies and nice stationery. She lives in Hove with her wife, daughter and dog.

Leone Ross was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, her second novel, Orange Laughter, chosen as a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour Watershed Fiction favourite. and her third novel, This One Sky Day, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Her short fiction has been widely anthologised and her first short-story collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, was nominated for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and the OCM BOCAS Prize. Ross has taught creative writing for twenty years, at University College Dublin, Cardiff University and Roehampton University in London. She is editor of the first black British anthology of speculative fiction, due out in 2022 with Peepal Tree Press. She is the winner of the Manchester Writing Competition 2021. Prior to writing fiction, Ross worked as a journalist. Leone Ross lives in London but intends to retire near water.

Shola von Reinhold is a writer born and based in Glasgow. Shola’s first novel LOTE was published in 2020 and subsequently won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and James Tait Black Prize in 2021.

Chair:

Simon Richardson is a BBC arts journalist and trustee of New Writing South, producer of several series about queer literature for Radios 3, 4 and the BBC
World Service.