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Gloucester Road Books and Bristol-based indie publisher Lurid Editions celebrate an important, and until now largely unknown queer novelist, Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1937-2023), and the republication of her finest novel, A Jingle Jangle Song.

Lurid Editions director, D-M Withers, will be in conversation with the acclaimed writer of A Flat Place, Noreen Masud, to discuss Villa-Gilbert’s life and work, the queer novel and publishing history, and the wider work of Lurid Editions.

Villa-Gilbert was a prolific young author in the 1960s, but has since slipped from the history books. She published six novels with Chatto & Windus in the 1960s and 70s, including A Jingle Jangle Song (first published in 1968), an atmospheric and cosy sapphic work set in London’s swinging folk scene.

A Jingle Jangle Song is the lost lesbian novel of the late 1960s, and one of only thirty published between 1946-67 that openly depicted a queer relationship. To read it, writes literary critic Leigh Wilson, “is to discover a missing link in the tradition of the 20th century lesbian novel.”

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Gloucester Road Books presents Matthew Rice in conversation with acclaimed author, Ralf Webb, about his latest work, Plastic, an unforgettable, book-length poem set during a twelve-hour factory shift. Based on Rice’s ten-year stint working at a plastic molding factory in Belfast, Plastic, published by leading indie outfit, Fitzcarraldo Edtions, is a rich examination of the workplace, menial labour, community, individuality, the art of poetry itself and much more besides.

This is a great chance to hear from two leading UK poets and encounter what is set to be one of 2026’s standout poetry publications.

‘Matthew Rice’s Plastic goes where poetry seldom does: the factory floow, the canteen, the night shift, and it does so astutely and with insight and grace. This is real and vital work.’ – Nick Laird, author of Up Late

‘Plastic confronts the daily realities of work and labour, revealing how the body endures the relentless grind. Yet within these poems are flashes of light, moments of grace and a quiet, fond sensibility. This continuous narrative offers a hopeful, heartfelt reorientation, reminding us of the vitality found in the overlooked lives of many. Surprising, tender and true.’
– Hatty Nestor, co-author of The Aching Poem

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Gloucester Road Books presents a rare opportunity to hear from the multi-award-winning Guatemalan author, Eduardo Halfon, and his translator, Daniel Hahn. They will be discussing Halfon’s unforgettable novel, Tarantula, his fifth to be translated into English.

Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Premio de la Critica in Spain, Tarantula is based on the author’s time spent at a concentration camp re-enactment as a 12-year-old in 1980s Guatemala. It is an uncompromising examination of the Holocaust’s far-reaching, devastating legacy as decades later that same 12-year-old, now a successful writer, encounters the camp’s counsellor and discovers the deeper truth behind an experience that indelibly scarred his life.

In the words of the novel’s publisher, Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton: “Tarantula is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement… and how the past lives on in the present.”

‘Among [Halfon’s] preoccupations are the legacy of violence and mass murder in Europe and Latin America; the frequency and facility with which the past intrudes upon the present; the quixotic effort to separate family myth from historical fact; and the ways in which pleasure consoles us.’ New York Review of Books

‘This novel about a violent and traumatic childhood episode is eerily current – the questions it raises about identity, resistance and history are both deeply personal and universal.’ Mariana Enriquez

‘This taut, magisterial novel explores the possibility of disentangling one’s trauma and one’s roots.’ Le Monde des livres (France)

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Gloucester Road Books hosts the acclaimed author and poet, Luke Kennard, who will be discussing his dazzling new novel, Black Bag, with award-winning poet, author and performer, Bristol’s very own Stefan Mohamed.

Black Bag sees a penniless and out-of-work actor pick up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend’s students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. Another professor at the same university develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation.

Join Luke Kennard as he reveals all about this singularly wild, unrestrained and thought-provoking novel.

“Such a smart and philosophical novel really has no business being this entertaining. Black Bag is hilarious, profound, tender and deranged.” Anna Metcalfe

“Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair.” Joe Dunthorne

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Gloucester Road Books presents a rare opportunity to hear from the acclaimed Greek poet, Phoebe Giannisi, who will be discussing and reading from her latest publication, Goatsong, in conversation with her translator, Brian Sneeden.

Goatsong brings together three of Giannisi’s lauded collections for the first time to produce a volume of unmissable verse.

In the publisher’s (Fitzcarraldo Editions) words:

‘The ancient Greek word for tragedy (τραγωδία) is a compound of goat (τράγος) and song (ᾠδή). In Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong, the seam that connects human and animal, myths and history, is the body.

‘In Giannisi’s language, life obeys myth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn’t stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we’re told “the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.”

‘Adjacent to the mythical setting is the material, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle – chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered – begins after weaning, and is lain alongside how we think: ‘from the moment of separation / from the mother / they ruminate.’ In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still.’

‘I was immersed in Phoebe Giannisi’s Goatsong. I grieved with her as a mother, and rejoiced with her as a lover of all wild and wonderful places. Her work lives in me and inspires me to work harder to capture the truth – as the best poetry always does.’
— Sasha Dugdale, author of The Strongbox

‘Goatsong intoxicates with its animality of language, gorgeous lyric and off-kilter metamorphoses, by turns wry, ecstatic and strange. Reading Phoebe Giannisi is like reading pre-Socratic philosophy on all fours, where flies buzz on and off the page and the polyphony of species and elements is both dazzling subject and all-encompassing medium.’
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul