Liberating the Canon

Non-conforming, radically innovative, intersectional, progressive and decidedly queer.  Hannah Silva co-wrote My Child, the Algorithm with a toddler and and the AI predecessor of ChatGPT;  Adam Macqueen traverses genre, from satire and political non-fiction (The Lies of the Land: An Honest History of Political Deceit) to queer thrillers featuring fictional rent-boys and real-life political characters (Beneath the Streets); H Gareth Gavin intimately explores identity in their inventive, part hallucination, part bildungsroman, Never Was. 

Join Hannah, Adam and Gareth as they discuss how they are pushing against established literary conventions and contributing to an emerging queer literary subculture. The panel will be chaired by queer theorist, author and University of Sussex lecturer, Sam Ladkin.

Hannah Silva is a writer and performer working in sound poetry, radio and experimental non-fiction. Their eighth BBC radio play, “An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love” was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press/Soft Skull) – Silva’s questioning of love and queer single parenting is woven into surreal and funny contributions by a predecessor of ChatGPT, and a toddler (a Granta Book of the Year 2023). Silva’s record Talk in a bit was in the Wire’s Top 25 Albums of 2018. Their story “A Single Parent Flat Hunting on Universal Credit, London 2023” was recently shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.

Adam Macqueen is a novelist, journalist and writer of non-fiction. Adam’s first novel, political thriller Beneath the Streets, the first in a series featuring rent-boy turned amateur detective Tommy Wildeblood, was published by Lightning Books in 2020. The second Wildeblood book, The Enemy Within, followed in 2022, and the third, The Inalienable Right, is coming in April 2025. His first collection of supernatural stories, Haunted Tales: Ghostly Stories for the Darkest Nights, will be published by Swift Press in October 2024. Adam’s non-fiction books include The Prime Minister’s Ironing Board and other State Secrets (Little, Brown, 2013) and the The Lies of the Land: An Honest History of Political Deceit (Atlantic 2018). He has been a journalist on Private Eye magazine since 1997, and wrote the bestselling history of the magazine which was published for its 50th anniversary in 2011 as well as editing 2021’s The 60 Yearbook, a compilation of the biggest historical, political and cultural events of the last six decades as they were recorded in the pages of the satirical magazine. Adam has also worked at Popbitch and The Big Issue.

H Gareth Gavin was born in Birmingham in 1984. Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize. Never Was (Cipher Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He also writes short fiction: a short story, ‘Home Death’, was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2019/20. Funny Queer, a hand-sewn limited edition collection of stories, was published by the Aleph Press in 2021. An essay on transmasculinity and femininity, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ takes its title from a Muriel Spark ghost story and is collected in Queer Life, Queer Love (Muswell Press, 2021). He currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

Sam Ladkin is the author of Perfectly Disgraceful: Frank O’Hara’s New York School and Mid-Century Mannerism (Oxford University Press). With Luke Roberts he co-edited So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat, 2023), the first comprehensive edition of poetry by this neglected writer. He works on queer theory as well as queer writers, including O’Hara and Hyatt. He is the co-editor of five collections of poetry and essays, most recently Against Value in the Arts & Education (Rowman & Littlefield), and has published articles on Tom Raworth, Walt Whitman, and Rob Halpern, amongst others. He lectures at the University of Sussex.