The Queer Bookshelf

Bookshops, especially queer ones, are more than retail spaces. They are often refuges, meeting points, and lifelines. They can be seats of liberation, connection and social change. This panel, chaired by award-winning library manager Zoey Dixon, brings together A.J. West, Layla McCay and Jane Cholmeley, for a celebration of queer bookshops and the communities they build.

AJ West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed The World, is a passionate tribute to the radical histories and survival of LGBTQ+ bookshops. Layla McCay’s The Queer Bookshelf, is a celebration of queer reading lists, visibility and the power of representation on the shelf, and Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop of One’s Own, reflects on the founding and legacy of the iconic Silver Moon Bookshop and the feminist and queer networks it helped sustain. This panel traces the glorious cultural and political impact of spaces built around books.

Together, they ask what it means to have a space to gather, to recommend, to shelter, and how bookshops have quietly helped save queer lives. 

3-Day Festival and Friday 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.

A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World explores independent bookshops as the unsung heroes of queer liberation. His celebrated novel The Betrayal of Thomas True was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. He is an award-winning former BBC journalist and broadcaster from Buckinghamshire. He writes for newspapers and magazines and appears regularly on national television and radio. AJ’s debut novel, The Spirit Engineer was awarded the coveted HWA Debut Crown Award.

Layla McCay is the author of The Queer Bookshelf: A Reader’s Guide, a celebration and guide to LGBTQ+ literature past, present and future. A passionate reader and host of queer book clubs across the UK, US and Japan, she is also an acclaimed performance storyteller with The Moth, wrote Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling about being LGBTQ+ on the career ladder, and appears regularly on the BBC. Layla lives with her wife in London.

Jane Cholmeley co-founded Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop, which opened on the Charing Cross Road in 1984 and went on to become the largest women’s bookshop in Europe. In 1999 Silver Moon had an annual turnover of approx £806,000 (that’s £1.5 million today) As well as being a centre for the lesbian and feminist community, many authors visited the shop including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood. Sandi Toksvig nominated Jane as a Gay Icon in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of that name in 2009. In February 2024 Jane published a memoir of Silver Moon called A Bookshop of One’s Own.

Zoey Dixon (chair) works for Lambeth Libraries combining her strategic and management roles, with the planning and delivery of quality frontline services to children and young people. She has sat on the judging panels for The Carnegies, The Branford Boase, The British Book Awards and the Polari Children’s and YA Prize. In 2020 she was one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars and in the same year awarded YLG Librarian of the Year. In 2023 she was awarded the CILIP Presidential Citation and a BEM.