Asian Australian former international development adviser who worked on human rights, gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights in Southeast Asia, Shelley Parker-Chan couldn’t find what they were looking for in existing fantasy – queerness, or the big, character-driven emotional arcs that you find in romance – so they decided to write their own. He Who Drowned the […]
He Who Drowned the World: Shelley Parker-Chan

Fynest Reads: This Arab Is Queer

An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers, Edited by Elias Jahshan. This edition’s Fynest Read is a ground-breaking anthology of LGBTQ+ Arab writing, featuring the compelling and courageous memoirs of eighteen queer Arab writers – some internationally bestselling, others using pseudonyms. Here, we find heart-warming connections and moments of celebration alongside essays exploring the challenges of […]
Fynest Reads: Gay’s The Word

Gay’s The Word is the UK’s oldest LGBT bookshop and a touchstone for the broader LGBT community. The bookshop was set up in January 1979 by a group of gay socialists as a community space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. This ethos continues today with shelves bursting with books and the […]
Fynest Reads: Mostly Books

An Award-Winning Independent Bookshop, Mostly Books, based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire got in touch for this edition’s Fynest Reads. They shared with us their favourite LGBTQIA+ literature, from Fiction to non, and old to new. Nonfiction Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey, Ben Miller ISBN: 9781839763274 Price: £20.00 Following on from their […]
Fynest Reads: Showcasing the Very Best of Queer Literature

In this edition of our Fynest Reads series, we were lucky enough to hear from Birmingham-based LGBT+ bookshop, Proud Geek, who aim to be your one-stop-online-shop for everything geeky and queer. Whether you’re a book geek, a comic geek or a film geek, you’ll find something that was created by, and for people just like […]
Book Preview: The Love That Dares

A good love letter can speak across centuries and reassure us that the agony and the ecstasy one might feel in the 21st century have been shared by lovers long gone. This is all the truer of LGBTQ+ love letters: love affairs and relationships that, until very recently, had to survive within sealed envelopes and […]
COVID, Creativity, and Croquembouche Cones

Credit: Tanaka Mhishi Tanaka Mhishi is a poet, playwright and performer who makes issue-based work. With a record of creating pieces which handle ‘tricky’ topics like sexual violence, masculinity, biphobia and race, Tanaka takes a bespoke, whole community approach; helping audiences have vital, difficult conversations one piece of art at a time. Ahead of his […]