Queer Nature, Radical Gardens

Join us for a deep dive into how queerness and nature entwine; the social, the botanical, and how the inheritance of colonial, patriarchal, hetero and cis-normative categorisations have coloured our understanding of natural and horticultural worlds as well as of human ones. What grows when we use writing to explore gardens, forests, mountains and more with awareness of this, through curious, queer, intersectional eyes?

This panel brings together the unique voices of Natasha Carthew (Undercurrent, Rough Edges), Jenny Charmarette (Q is for Garden) and Forestry England writer-in-residence, Zakiya McKenzie. The panel will be hosted by environmental humanities and queer ecology researcher, declan wiffen (indiscriminate lanking).

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.

Jenny Chamarette is an author, educator, artist and curator based in London. An internationally recognised essayist and cultural critic, their writing has featured in Sight & Sound’s poll of the 100 best films of all time, been longlisted and shortlisted for the Nan Shepherd and Fitzcarraldo essay prizes and published in anthologies by Saraband and Elliott & Thompson. Their art writing has been commissioned by Unit and Grand Union galleries and appeared in outlets such as Another Gaze, LUX and Club des Femmes. Jenny is also Commissioning Co-Editor for the MAI Feminism and Visual Culture imprint of Punctum Books. When not writing they are usually in the garden or the allotment. Their latest book (Q is for Garden) is out now with Manchester University Press.

Natasha Carthew is a working class author of ten books that span poetry, fiction and narrative non-fiction. Her greatly acclaimed Nero Award shortlisted Memoir Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience published with Hodder in 2023. Her much anticipated new book Rough Edges: Where Land Meets Water, the Untold Stories of Coastline Communities with Sceptre/Hodder is out now. Natasha is known for writing on many socio economic issues including rural poverty and access to nature for several publications, programmes and organisations including ITV, The Royal Society of Authors Journal, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, The National Trust, The Bookseller, The Guardian, The Quietus, The Observer, The Women’s Prize, Mslexia, ALCS, The Big Issue, Dispatch Media, The Booker Prize, The Campaign to Protect Rural England and The Economist.

Dr. Zakiya McKenzie is a writer and cultural historian based in Bristol, UK. In 2019 she was writer-in-residence for Forestry England and in 2021 artist-in-residence at Studio Voltaire in London. Her 2021 Rough Trade Books historical fiction pamphlet, Testimonies on the History of Jamaica Vol. 1, explores the natural and social history of Jamaica in 1655, the year Britain took the colony from Spain. Dr. McKenzie won the 2023 Olivette Otele Prize in Black British Studies, convened by the Institute of Historical Research, for her paper The Making of the Empire Windrush as a cultural motif, which challenged contemporary ideas of the Empire Windrush as a vessel of hope and dreams for postwar Caribbean people in Britain. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Exeter on the history of Black British newsprint in December 2023. Her essays have appeared in anthologies including Haunting Ashton Court, Radical Landscapes, Reading the Forest, Women on Nature, Gifts of Gravity and Light, and The Wild Isles.

Dr declan wiffen (chair) is a writer and teacher living in Kent. He runs a yearly queer writing retreat for Write Southwest Scotland, is making a short documentary about the writer Kate O’Brien, and his current writing projects are interested in archival desire, queer gardens, gossip as scholarship

This panel is supported by The University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)