First event of 2026

a very happy 2026 to you all. We hope you’re festive season was a really enjoyable experience and that you didn’t miss us too much!

One of the many joyous things we get to do is collaborate with some of our favourite publishers when putting together our events programme. Very much at the forefront of this are fellow Bristol buddies, Lurid Editions, who seek out and publish largely unknown queer 20th century gems that might otherwise have languished in distant archives.

So we’re delighted to be opening this year’s events line up with Lurid’s latest publication: Mariana Villa-Gilbert’s radical, significant and surprising novel, A Jingle Jangle Song, first published in 1968 andset in the heady days of the ’60s London folk scene.

Lurid Editions director, D-M Withers, will be in conversation with the acclaimed writer of A Flat Place, Noreen Masud, to discuss A Jingle Jangle Song and Villa-Gilbert’s little known life and work.

Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to hear lots more about this singular, trailblazing writer.

“Late 60s London, folk singer Sarah Kumar arrives to give a concert. She is hot stuff and a hot mess – androgynous, awkward and alluring. Kumar attends hip parties, sings to her fans and passes out wasted. She is a picture of consummate coolness, hid nervously behind huge sunglasses – a subversive imagining of a strong queer female lead amid the commercial folk boom.

“Inside the countercultural throng, Kumar’s life is soon derailed by an encounter with an older woman, the intoxicating Mrs Stankovich.

“Buried in the archives for far too long, A Jingle Jangle Song is the lost queer novel of the late 1960s. Eccentric and atmospheric, sweet and satirical, the novel celebrates how queer desire erupts in unexpected – and unignorable – ways.”

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Mariana Villa-Gilbert (1937-2023) published six novels with Chatto & Windus in the 1960s and ’70s. The short story collection, The Sun in Hours, the final published work in her lifetime, came out in 1986. In the 1990s Villa-Gilbert moved to Cornwall and retreated from public view.

Lurid Editions are a Bristol-based indie publisher who publish rediscovered LGBTQIA+ books from the twentieth century archive.

D-M Withers is Director of Lurid Editions and Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Exeter where they are also Co-Director of the MA in Publishing programme.

Dr Noreen Masud is a lecturer in twentieth century literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, making programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4. Her memoir, A Flat Place, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Jhalak Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. It was also selected for numerous Books of the Year lists, including by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The News On Sunday (Pakistan) and The Sunday Times.