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THE QUEER LIT SPECIAL

'Queer Lit is about being full-on queer and never compromising.'

PP Hartnett

INHALE HOLD RELEASE

'Literary agents, commissioning editors, publishers and LGBTQIA+ curators
invariably sanitise as each play to funding bodies, publishers, advertisers and many a
queer coterie,' states London Irish Queer Lit Editor PP Hartnett.

'I'm not a fan of beautifully-languaged, clever-clever formulated work that follows an
established template. Material which feels too acquired, workshopped to brainwashed
death. Poetry by numbers. Following the herd, doing everything by the regimented
book. I dread churned-out efforts with a bandwagon vibe. Loathe parasitic read-a-likes,
sound-a-likes.

In terms of content, I seek work that is genuinely dif, as in different, by writers who
select to be out on the screen / out on the printed page. I seek work that veers towards
poetry but without ticking the standard boxes.'

Arthur Waley (1865 - 1966), an early translator of Japanese literature, wrote:

'Japanese poetry lacks sentence structure. It is imprecise in articles, particles,
plurals and gender, using neither capital letters nor punctuation. Rhyme is easy
and monotonous and, therefore, something to be avoided.'

'As both a writer and editor, I'm not a slave to the hoops and hurdles of rhythmical
strategies, calculations in meter, a formal approach to structure.'

Project editor and conceptual artist/ author PP Hartnett