Joelle Taylor in Conversation: C+NTO, Maryville and Dyke Countercultures

*** UPDATE 22 JUNE: In light of the heatwave we have taken to decision to postpone this event until autumn ***

From the T.S. Eliot Prize and Polari Prize-winning author of C+NTO & Othered Poems comes Maryville – a poetry collection exploring the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke counterculture and the queer underground.

With a vividly sketched cast of characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is familiar. A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, prayer and insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back to their bodies, a community to their feet.

Join us for a special evening with Joelle Taylor to explore the world of Maryville & C+NTO. Following a reading-cum-performance, Joelle will be in conversation with Queer@King’s Director Zeena Feldman. We will conclude the evening with an audience Q&A. Copies of Maryville and C+NTO will be available for purchase.

Photo credit: Robin Christian

About the speaker:

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television screenplay, and was featured on Radio Three documentary Butch. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is a Poetry Fellow of the University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023 and has judged several poetry and literary prizes including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her most recent radio programme A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcast at the end of last year on BBC Radio Four. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named in the Guardian’s Pride Power list. Her collection Maryville was recently published by Bloomsbury.

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Event location: King's Building, room KIN 205 (Nash Lecture Theatre)

Entrance: through the Strand Building - map