What do our bodies carry with them? How do memory, loss and desire shape the stories we tell about ourselves, and the futures we imagine? From ghosts and mythologies to climate catastrophe and queer longing, this event explores the haunted body as a site of remembrance, transformation and possibility.
Join us for an evening of readings and conversation examining hauntology, embodiment and speculative futures through the work of four acclaimed writers whose fiction and poetry move between the intimate and the uncanny, the personal and the political.
Award-winning poet Joelle Taylor will read from her work and reflect on the bodies, histories and communities that haunt the present. Across collections including C+NTO & Othered Poems and Maryville, Taylor's writing traces queer lives through memory, desire and survival, exploring the traces left behind by those pushed to the margins of history.
Novelist and short story writer Julia Armfield will discuss her genre-defying fiction, including Our Wives Under the Sea and Private Rites. Blending horror, speculative fiction and queer intimacy, Armfield's work examines grief, transformation and the strange ways in which bodies, and relationships, are altered by forces beyond our understanding.
Poet, novelist and broadcaster Salena Godden will explore mortality, memory and imagination through her acclaimed writing. Her award-winning novel Mrs Death Misses Death reimagines death itself as a companion and storyteller, asking what it means to live with loss while continuing to imagine new futures.
Poet, playwright and illustrator Nikita Gill will reflect on the enduring power of myth, folklore and storytelling in shaping contemporary identities. Drawing on traditions from across cultures, her work reimagines inherited narratives, offering new ways of understanding the self, the body and the worlds we might yet create.
Together, these conversations will consider what haunts us, personally, politically and collectively, and how literature can help us navigate the spaces between memory and futurity, absence and presence, loss and becoming.
This salon centres lesbian, female and bisexual experiences and literatures while engaging with wider queer cultures and speculative traditions. All are welcome.
Doors: 6pm
Readings and conversation: 6.30-8.30pm
Book signings and bar open: 8.30-9pm