Emotional Ties and Linked Lives: Family Isn’t Always (Straight)forward

Helpful or hindering, loving or destructive; finding and being welcome as family is one of our most central needs, impacting both our mental and physical well-being. Relationships with family can take on different resonances, challenges and complications for us as queer people, especially coming up against dominant social rules and expectations. 

Join authors Olumide Popoola (Like Water, Like Sea), Arathi Menon (Da) and Santanu Bhattacharya (Deviants), along with chair Tanya Byrne (In the Shallows), for an in-depth exploration of how these complex relationships to family are explored in contemporary queer fiction, covering lineages in experience, legal threats, grief, self-discovery, resilience and love. 

3-Day Festival and Saturday Pass holders: This event is free to attend with your pass, but advance registration is required as places are limited. Please book a Pass Holder Free Registration ticket to reserve your place. Without a reservation, we cannot guarantee entry.

Olumide Popoola is a London-based Nigerian-German writer. Her publications include a novella, a play, a short story collection, essays, poetry, hybrid and experimental texts, as well as recordings in collaboration with musicians. Olumide is a Lecturer in Poetry (Creative Writing) at Greenwich University. She is also dedicated to nurture and uplift emerging LGBTQ+ writers outside of institutions, most recently through her Arts Council funded mentoring scheme The Future is Back. Olumide’s critically acclaimed novels When We Speak of Nothing and Like Water Like Sea were published by Cassava Republic Press in 2017 and 2024.

Arathi Menon is an author and columnist based in London. She completed her MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) at the University of East Anglia. Her debut fiction book, Da, is published by Fly on the Wall Press, UK. Her awards include the SI Leeds Literary Prize and Novel London. She has also been on numerous shortlists and longlists, including the BPA First Novel Award, Cinnamon Literary Award, Virginia Prize for Fiction, UA 100X100, FAB Prize, Ivan Juritz Prize and the Penguin WriteNow programme.

Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of two novels, One Small Voice and Deviants, and several works of short fiction. One Small Voice was an Observer Best Debut Novel for 2023, and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize. Deviants won the Rainbow Award and BLF-Atta Galata Prize for Fiction Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Santanu is the recipient of the Desmond Elliott Prize Residency, the Mo Siewcharran Prize, the Life Writing Prize, and a London Writers’ Award. He grew up in India, and now lives in London.

After eight years at BBC Radio, Tanya Byrne (chair) left to write her debut novel, Heart-Shaped Bruise, which earned her a nomination for New Writer of the Year at the National Book Awards. Since then, her novels have hit both the Amazon and Waterstones bestseller lists and have been published around the world. She has also contributed to several short story anthologies including A Change is Gunna Come, which was named Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week and was honoured with a Special Achievement Award by the YA Book Prize