‘Queers Read This is a literature event series that isn’t boring.’

Co-organised by Richard Porter and Isabel Waidner.

“If there were a literary avant-garde that were relevant now, it would be what the queers and their allies are doing, at the intersections, across disciplines. This avant-garde would be inclusive, racially and culturally diverse, migrants galore, predominately but not exclusively working-class, transdisciplinary, (gender)queer and politically clued up (left).” Isabel Waidner

Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018) is an anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming literatures in the UK and beyond. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution ‘Innovative Literature’ as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.

Liberating the Canon is edited by Isabel Waidner, and includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts: Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D. Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.

BUY NOW £6/$10

“This is Publishing and Writing as Borderline Activism” — An Interview With Isabel Waidner by Thom Cuell, Minor Literature[s]

“Liberating the Canon: Intersectionality and Innovation in Literature” — Introduction by Isabel Waidner, 3:AM Magazine

Double book launch for Isabel Waidner’s queer avant-garde novel Gaudy Bauble (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017) and Richard Dodwell’s (ed.) Not Here, a queer anthology of loneliness (Pilot Press, 2017).

With readings by Richard Dodwell, Isabel Waidner, Eley Williams, Timothy Thornton, an improv Q&A, a pop up queer art gallery and a live DJ set by Chapter 10’s Charlie Porter.

The Arrow Maker 2 (8fold, 2017) is a literature/art journal co-edited by Ruth Hoeflich & Isabel Waidner. Featuring original work by Jen Calleja, Stefano Calligaro, Julia Calver, Prudence Chamberlain, Anna Gibbs, Allison Grimaldi-Donahue, Philipp Gufler, Ruth Hoeflich, Judith Kakon, Adam Knight, Sonya Lacey, Megan Plunkett, Scott Rogers, Mira Mattar, Suzanne Mooney, Isabel Waidner, Eley Williams, Bernadette Wolbring, & Sarah Wood. Published digitally. ISSN 2055 2211.

I contributed a piece of experimental fiction to the DICTIONARY OF LOST LANGUAGES (2015), edited by the artist and film-maker Sarah Wood. The book also includes pieces by Ali Smith, Olivia Laing, Paul Bailey, & John Gallagher. Read my contribution DEXY THE FIERY DE-EXTINGUISHER. It appears in the DICTIONARY under F, for Fiction.