Staff and students help to showcase LGBTQ+ voices at the UK's only queer literary festival

The Coast is Queer Festival runs for four days from 12 October at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative arts. It features an extensive line-up of nationally and internationally acclaimed queer writers, poets, performers and activists for a packed programme of talks, workshops, films and discussions celebrating LGBTQ+ lives and writing.

The festival is organised by New Writing South, a non-profit organisation for writers living and working in the South East of England, in partnership with Marlborough Productions and the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. This is now the event's fourth year and, for the first time, students from the universities have been asked to select the contributors for the opening day.

Jamie Raines

Dr Vedrana Velickovic, Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton, is an advisory board member for the festival and has been involved in the event since it began in 2019. She says: “This year, we really wanted to engage the students in the festival so we came up with this idea to recruit some of them and get them to work together and curate their own events, and they've done brilliantly.”

Brighton students involved in the festival are Alexa Rusakoff (English Literature), Sandy Swain (Creative Writing) and Izelle Kulunk (English Literature). The students were given “free rein” on what to do, according to Vedrana. “We just supported the infrastructure and asked what kind of events young queer people would like to see at the festival."

The resulting events, which are sponsored by the university's Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), include a panel on Invisible Identities, discussing unspoken gender identities, sexualities and attraction styles, as well an ‘In Conversation’ event with some really exciting young Black queer writers on crossing boundaries and borders in queer literature.

“The events are proving really popular,” Vedrana says. “The students have got a famous YouTuber, Jamie Raines, on their panel talking on the panel about invisible queerness, which will be interesting. Our student Alexa Rusakoff is also chairing this event. They've got a zine-making workshop as well, which will be fun - that's already sold out.”

Vedrana's own CAPPE-sponsored event will take place on Saturday, and will see writers Max Lobe and Okechukwu Nzelu in conversation about queer literature’s contribution to exploring and exploding all kinds of boundaries and borders. “Max Lobe lives in Switzerland, and his novel is about queer migrations and political borders," Vedrana says. “As part of CAPPE, we have an EU Horizon-funded project on the politics of the novel in Europe, and I'm currently leading this strand on fictions of the political, which all ties in."

Other highlights of the four days include novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and columnist Juno Dawson's Lovely Trans Literary Salon who will be in conversation with Harry Nicholas, author of the recently published A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar; a panel discussion asking what it means to be a queer writer in a time of war, featuring Ukrainian writers from the front line; a performance by Joelle Taylor; the Queer History Club, a panel event chaired by filmmaker Dr Topher Campbell on the importance of preserving queer heritage; and an exploration of queer mental health. Another University of Brighton academic, Dr Lou Tondeur from the School of Humanities and Social Science, will also be hosting a workshop on Writing and Wellbeing in partnership with the university's Centre for Arts and Wellbeing.

Juno Dawson credit Eivind Hansen

Queer diaspora

For Vedrana herself, the festival has offered the opportunity to build a community both in Brighton and further afield.

“I think one reason for me getting involved and wanting to do a festival like this was that I lost the connection with the queer community after moving to London and then Brighton,” she says. “Brighton, being the queerest city in the UK, enables those connections to form again. But I think I was particularly interested in finding a literary-minded scene in the community. And one of the joys of doing this festival has been reestablishing my queer community in Brighton, and it has been growing and growing since then.”

 And it's not just in Brighton that these connections have been made, Vedrana notes. “In one year of the festival, when we did an online version during COVID, I was quite keen to reconnect with the queer community in former Yugoslavia, where I come from, because I knew there had been so many exciting queer writers from that region,” she says. “So we hosted a panel on queer writers from my former country and had a wonderful conversation. So, it's building the queer community in Brighton, but also making links with the queer diaspora across the continent and beyond, that's what the festival enables me to do.”

The festival is also important in the wider political sphere, she believes. “Some of the promotional materials for the festival include these lovely postcards with different slogans. And one of the slogans is ‘Stop Banning Queer Books’. I think that's another reason why the festival is important, because we know in the United States so many queer books are being banned in schools at the moment, all kinds of books on the so-called ‘political’ or ‘controversial’ topics. In the UK, we are experiencing increasing and worrying levels of transphobia and homophobia. So there are political, educational and activist reasons for having this kind of festival, too.”

More than that, the festival is a celebration and a recognition of positive change with an acknowledgment that our rights can be easily taken away – for example, what we are witnessing in Italy with same sex-parents - and that so many of our trans siblings continue to experience discrimination and even violence.

“Really in the last couple of years or even decades, I think there's been an explosion of queer writing in this country," Vedrana says. “I remember when I was growing up in communist former Yugoslavia, I didn't have any books with any kind of queer literary representation. And now to see what's available for young readers, it's amazing. Seeing more young people engage with this kind of writing, it's exciting. I also teach a module on Queer Writing and every year we read at least one of the books at the festival. The students get to hear and meet some of the contemporary queer writers that they are studying.”

The Coast is Queer runs at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in Brighton from 12-15 October 2023. The full line-up and ticket information are available at coastisqueer.com