Aesthetes Attack Angleterre: Trans Graphic Novels and Queer Writing

Join qUCL for this exciting literary event! Trans writers Cat Fitzpatrick and Bishakh Som read from their award-winning works and engage in a lively Q&A about trans and queer writing and publishing.

Cat Fitzpatrick will read from their Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Call-Out; "A fast-paced, debut tragicomedy of manners written in verse about queer (mostly trans) women that is funny, literary, philosophical, witty, sometimes bitchy and sometimes heartbreaking." 
https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4458-the-call-out 

Bishakh Som will read from Apsara Engine, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for best LGBTQ+ Comics; "By turns fantastical and familiar, this graphic short story collection is immersed in questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity." 
https://www.feministpress.org/books-a-m/apsara-engine

The Call-Out
Aashvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society—picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups—The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.

A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator’s bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.

Apsara Engine
The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality: a woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.

Painted in rich sepia-toned watercolors, Apsara Engine is Bishakh Som's highly anticipated debut work of fiction. Showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds—which ring all too familiar—Som captures the weight of twenty-first-century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.

Please register to attend at https://qucl-queerwriting.eventbrite.co.uk and familiarise yourself with our Code of Conduct