The UK’s Biggest and Brightest Festival of LGBTQ+ Literature – The Coast is Queer – is back from October 10-13 2024 and Super Early Bird Festival Passes are on sale now!
Brighton & Hove’s festival of LGBTQ+ writing is back and running from 10-13 October 2024. Join us for three days of lively conversations, panels, workshops, performances and films celebrating some of our best and brightest LGBTQ+ writers at Brighton’s Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.
The first festival of its kind in the UK, The Coast is Queer creates a space for queer readers, writers and allies to come together in a grassroots celebration of the written word and its ability to illuminate and enrich the life of our community.
The past decade has seen a substantial rise in the number of LGBTQ+ titles published and brilliant queer book shops springing up across the UK. The Coast is Queer was established in 2019 to honour and contribute to this blossoming. But our commitment to queer literature extends beyond celebration. The festival also explores the ecosystems that make queer literature possible and invites authors into conversation with audiences and with each other.
History teaches us that liberation is not a straight line. It is an ongoing struggle that can move backwards as well as forwards. The attacks on trans rights underway in the UK and the growing suppression of LGBTQ+ stories in the form of book bans around the world are yet more evidence that we need to come together to champion our stories and our story-tellers, now more than ever.
The line-up for 2024 includes a dazzling opening event on Thursday 10 October Celebrating 30 years of DIVA Magazine – Telling Our Stories – Then & Now – with DIVA’s Roxy Bourdillon, Gay Times’ Reeta Loi, and Attitude’s Matthew Todd, chaired by Paula Akpan.
Friday’s events – partly curated by students from Sussex University – feature panels exploring Queer Fantasy Writing and Writing Queer Stories for Multiple Generations. Also on Friday, we talk Politics and Hope with Leah Cowan, Amelia Abraham and Sharan Dhaliwal, and dive into Queer Nightlife with historians, DJs and authors Daren Kay & Alf Le Flohic, Dan Glass, and DJ Paulette chaired by Kathy Caton. Rounding off Friday’s festivities, our artist in residence AFLO the Poet is bringing you a tantalising Poetry Open Mic event featuring some of the most exciting queer poets writing today.
Workshops on Friday cover: Pitching to Agents, Self-Publishing, and Reading and Performing for Live Audiences.
Saturday is jam-packed with panels, in-conversations and workshops including Liberating the Queer Canon with H Gareth Gavin, Adam Macqueen and Julia Armfield; Writing for Performance with Matilda Feyisayo Ibini, Charlie Josephine and Alexis Gregory, chaired by Debbie Hanna, and we delve into wild intrigue with Environmental Writers Roma Wells, Mike Parker and Natasha Carthew. Lotte Jeffs, Stu Oakley and Ben Fergusson will talk Queer Parenting and Tanushka Marah will chair Decolonising Futures with Saleem Haddad, lisa luxx and Sophie Chamas. Sex, Lust and Romance is the distinctly queer theme of a Polari Prize legacy panel featuring Paul Burtson, Jon Ransom, Nicola Dinan and Viola Di Grado and Saleem Haddad’s stunning film, Marco will be screened with a director’s Q&A .
Novelist, screenwriter and Sunday Times Number 1 Bestseller Juno Dawson returns with another edition of her Lovely Trans Literary Salon, this time featuring Kuchenga Shenjé, whose debut novel The Library Thief has taken the publishing world by storm and the day will culminate with the David Hoyle Does The Classics Cabaret and 3 new young-artist commissions.
Workshops and additional events on Saturday include a Print Workshop, a Work in Progress Breakfast, a Private Rites Book Club event in collaboration with Brighton’s Real Writer’s Circle and Julia Armfield, a buzzing book launch for Lea Anderson’s exquisite Cholmondeleys & Featherstonehaughs
We’re rounding off the festival with a spellbinding Sunday of events including a Queer Memoir panel featuring Dean Atta, Karen McLeod and Juano Diaz, chaired by literary agent Abi Fellows; a Celebration of James Baldwin’s Life and Work with Mendez and Douglas Field chaired by Campbell X; an inspiring poetry workshop and a joyful closing event celebrating Radical Hope – a smorgasbord of spoken word, performance, films, activities and keynotes that will leave you invigorated, excited and feeling connected to the queer literary community.
We’re also delighted to announce that we’ve teamed up with Radio Reverb’s The Brighton Book Club production team to release a series of five podcasts featuring events from 2023’s festival. Revisit excellent events including: Queer Representation in Commercial Fiction, Queer Working Class Identities and Juno Dawson’s Lovely Trans Literary Salon. Episodes will be released fortnightly from August 5, 2024.
