From the T. S. Eliot and Polari Prize-winning author Joelle Taylor comes Maryville - an innovative collection exploring the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke counterculture and the queer underground.
Taylor transplants the four butches introduced in her award-winning C+NTO, into London's Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers – an imagined space that blends the now-endangered London dyke pubs of Taylor's youth. They bring with them stories of incarceration, escape and resilience: a quality that will mark their friendship over the next 50 years.
Through the Maryville’s darkened windows, and accompanied by a decades-spanning soundtrack, we watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women’s liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture’s wild spread across the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much more.
Joelle will be reading from the book and discussing the collection and its wider themes, followed by an audience Q&A and then a book signing.
