Join us this February 20th for a Polari Press Launch: Jonathan Blake, Patient L1 by Simon Maddrell. There will be readings from Simon Maddrell, and Robert Hamberger, Nude Against A Rock.
Q&A with Jonathan Blake
This compelling verse memoir tells the story of Jonathan Blake. Born in 1949, Jonathan has lived through all the major advances in, and challenges to, LGBTQ+ lives in the UK, including the AIDS global epidemic.
Jonathan was born in Birmingham, England in 1949. Studying drama in Sidcup straight after school, Jonathan has been an actor ever since. He was also, one of the first to be diagnosed with HIV in 1982, so early that he was named Patient L1 at London Middlesex Hospital. Following his HIV diagnosis in 1982, Jonathan retrained as a tailor and worked at English National Opera. He shared 39 years of his life with Nigel Young, both of whom were members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners — immortalised in the film Pride.
Created from dozens of interviews, Simon Maddrell has crafted, in Jonathan's voice, a moving tribute to an extraordinary life.
Simon Maddrell was born in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1965. After a corporate career followed by founding an international environment and development charity, Simon starting writing poetry seriously in 2018. This is his sixth poetry pamphlet, and third in a series centred on queer history with Polari Press. Simon's debut poetry collection, blue spine, will be published by Out-Spoken Press in February 2026.
Simon Maddrell is the author of six pamphlets including a finger in derek jarman's mouth (Polari Press, 2024); Isle of Sin (Polari Press, 2023); and Joint-Winner of The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition 2020, Queerfella. Simon Maddrell's poems appear in publications including AMBIT, Gutter, Magma, MODRON, Poetry Wales, SAND Journal, Southword, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar.
NUDE AGAINST A ROCK
Published in October 2024, Nude Against A Rock, Robert Hamberger's exciting fifth collection, is a love song for the threatened world. There is a thematic widening of the lens that connects intimacy, home and family to other countries, porous borders. The collection culminates in a passionate sequence after the gay British painter Keith Vaughan, where the male 'body of contradictions' is a site of desire and tenderness, where landscape becomes a haven, and the artist is compelled to observe, create and bear witness.