Brighton - "book about coming out and what happens next"

For Beatrice, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Brighton, it comes just a couple of months after the publication of the paperback of her latest novel, All of You Every Single One, a love story which spans 1910 to 1946. The book follows Julia Lindqvist, who, after knowing Eve for three weeks, leaves her husband to start a new life in Vienna. Beatrice, whose research focuses on contemporary queer fiction, the ethics of historical fiction, writing the remote past and the endings/closure events of novels, will be in conversation at the festival on Sunday, October 9 from 3.45-5pm. The book came out as a hardback in August last year: “And it has had a really positive response. It has reached all the people that I wanted it to reach, obviously a wide section of people but particularly the LGBTQ+ community and within that community particularly people that are in a long relationship into middle age to show that long relationships can be so enriching. A lot of LGBTQ+ literature is about coming out and there is not so much that looks at a longer time span. This book is about coming out but then really does look at what happens next.

“With any novel there are lots and lots of threads that come together so it's hard to say that there is a particular seed but I'd been reading about the miserable Swedish writer Strindberg and I read a throwaway thing saying that his wife during one of his trips to Europe had run off with another woman for a little while. Strindberg wrote a vengeful piece about her. The wife didn't stay away. She came back into the fold but it was interesting just to think about the domestic life of these big characters in literature.”

Originally Beatrice was going to set the book in Geneva but then realised there was more that she could touch on and include if she shifted across to the Vienna of Freud. Now Beatrice is delighted to talk about the book at the Coast is Queer festival: “Brighton has got a really rich queer culture and the festival is a fantastic showcase for local queer writing and I love the idea of pay what you can. And there is a great range of authors at different stages of their career from those who are more established to those who are just emerging and as I teach creative writing it's just something that is great to be involved in.”

The Coast Is Queer, from October 7-9, presented by New Writing South and Marlborough Productions, returns in person this year. Now in its third year, The Coast is Queer brings together writers, poets, performers, academics, activists and of course readers, for three days of accessible, lively in-conversation events, workshops, films and discussions celebrating queer lives and literature. The festival is Brighton’s Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts.