Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and Blog

Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and Blog Lavender Menace opened as a bookshop in Edinburgh in 1982 and we now collect, conserve and celebrate the books we sold then.

This new anthology brings together art, poetry, science and speculative writing in a multidisciplinary collection that i...
17/08/2026

This new anthology brings together art, poetry, science and speculative writing in a multidisciplinary collection that inspires and educates in its exploration of sexual and gender diversity in nature.

***rflorafaunafunga is being launched at Lighthouse this Thursday with a talk by editor . See for details on the event.

In 1960s Georgia, a small-town teenager's journey to get an abortion brings her into contact with the civil rights movem...
16/08/2026

In 1960s Georgia, a small-town teenager's journey to get an abortion brings her into contact with the civil rights movement and the secret lives of q***r Black people in this poignant and funny novel.

Come chat about These Heathens with us at the Q***r Joy book club in September.

Find out more and book your place: https://lavendermenace.org.uk/event/q***r-joy

Edinburgh International Book Festival opened today at Edinburgh Futures - they’ll be featuring many q***r writers and ev...
16/08/2026

Edinburgh International Book Festival opened today at Edinburgh Futures - they’ll be featuring many q***r writers and events, of which these are a few:

Louise Welsh, Glasgow writer and literary legend, has just published The Cut Up, whose hero is a q***r auctioneer and part time detective - her event is chaired by Kirsty Logan and is on at 17:00 on Tuesday 18 August. You can also attend online on a pay what you can basis.

Dean Atta, YA and children’s author, whose short animation Two Black Boys in Paradise won a BAFTA award, has published his first adult novel, Big Man. His event will be chaired by Colin Grant and is on at 17:30 on Tuesday 18 August. He’ll also appear on Monday 17 August at 11:15 in an event designed for visitors with learning difficulties, focused around his picture book, Confetti. Anyone who needs support to attend this event can contact the Book Festival’s access team on [email protected].

Ali Smith, Scottish le***an novelist and short story writer, will appear in an event around her new novel, Glyph, at 11:45 on 29 August, in conversation with Claire Armitstead. Smith’s Seasonal Quartet novels are also featured in a musical performance by the Netherlands’ New European Ensemble - with works by four female composers and readings by Ali Smith herself, at 19:00 on Friday 28 August.

Q***rly Beloved is a celebration of q***r lives and writing by a panel of LGBTQ+ authors and people familiar with their books. Many will remember last year’s event with Harry Josephine Giles, Alan Hollinghurst, and Randa Jarrar. This year the panel includes Sigrid Nielsen of Lavender Menace and takes place at 13:30 on Saturday 29 August.

See the Book Festival programme for more events around q***r writing - and watch this space.

Disability Pride Month is celebrated in July - and last month we posted a short list of books by disabled q***r authors....
15/08/2026

Disability Pride Month is celebrated in July - and last month we posted a short list of books by disabled q***r authors. Now we have a new acquisition by Denton Welch - A Voice Through A Cloud, Welch’s novel about the cycling accident which left him severely disabled at age 20, and about his struggle to rebuild his life even when he failed to recover. Though he was frequently ill and had limited mobility, Welch pursued his career as an artist energetically and also became a writer of novels, poetry and short stories. He was gay and lived openly with his partner, Eric Oliver. Our copy of A Voice Through A Cloud is the 1951 Readers Union/John Lehman edition, still in the paper cover which calls it ‘a work of genius’, with a cutout newspaper review from June 1963 carefully folded inside.

Lavender Menace Q***r Books Archive is announcing a £119K grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to unlock Scotla...
13/08/2026

Lavender Menace Q***r Books Archive is announcing a £119K grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to unlock Scotland’s LGBTQ+ heritage and improve access to it for our community.

Lavender Menace Q***r Books Archive has grown out of Scotland’s first LGBTQ+ bookshops, Lavender Menace (1982–87) and West & Wilde (1987–97). Bob Orr and Sigrid Nielsen, the owners of the original Lavender Menace Bookshop, founded the Lavender Menace Q***r Books Archive in 2019 to keep this valuable LGBTQ+ book heritage alive and share it with the community. It works to create and maintain a free and welcoming community archive space for reading, research, and socialising. This funding will help to ensure that we can continue to deliver our mission, expand our reach, and build sustainability for the Archive—and, thus, preserve LGBTQ+ literature for future readers.

This new project will strengthen and share Scotland’s q***r history by expanding public access to our community archive, deepening national partnerships, and building long-term pathways for people to connect with LGBTQ+ heritage. Through a programme of outreach events, community-led research, and creative residencies, we will bring together volunteers, researchers, heritage professionals, and LGBTQ+ communities to identify shared histories, celebrate q***r literature and culture, and develop new ways for people to discover and understand this heritage. Our project will generate nationally significant resources, including a free online Finding Aid and Research Guide, a strengthened volunteer programme, and new creative interpretations of LGBTQ+ book heritage. These will ensure that Scotland’s q***r histories are visible, valued, and accessible long after the project ends.

Keava McMillan, Project Coordinator at Lavender Menace said:

“We are so excited to get support for our work preserving and sharing vital LGBTQ+ histories in Scotland. Thank you to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for this grant, and to everyone who supported us from the People’s Postcode Trust and our recent crowdfunder – your investment in our work made this grant possible.”

Read the full announcement on our blog: https://lavendermenace.org.uk/nlhf-2026

The world is full of exciting books by q***r and trans women, and nonbinary people - and if they’re not in English, we’r...
13/08/2026

The world is full of exciting books by q***r and trans women, and nonbinary people - and if they’re not in English, we’re unlikely to hear about them. Visitors from abroad who come to our archive or the Le***an Words Book Group often tell us about writers who haven’t been translated into English, or whose translated works aren’t reviewed or publicised. Italian Le***an poet Patrizia Cavalli is a good example - her first book, My Poems Won’t Change the World, found its way into our archive by accident. Her work is little known in Britain, though it has been translated from her native Italian into many languages. (There’s an interview with her in theparisreview.org.)The Women In Translation project is international and intersectional and exists to fight the neglect of non-English-language women writers - who are only 30% of writers in translation published in the UK. For Women in Translation Month, we’ll be highlighting more of them.

If you're looking for motivation and community to do some summer studying, then come along to our co-working session for...
11/08/2026

If you're looking for motivation and community to do some summer studying, then come along to our co-working session for q***r students, researchers, and writers. The next Future Drop-Outs session takes place on Monday 17th August.

Find out more and reserve a spot: https://lavendermenace.org.uk/event/future-drop-outs

‘No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn’t mean they live outside the world of speech…’ Humans tell endless stories ...
11/08/2026

‘No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn’t mean they live outside the world of speech…’ Humans tell endless stories about them, constantly trying to ‘figure them out.’ In this memoir poet Mark Doty tells the stories of Arden and Beau, the two dogs who helped him survive his grief over the death of his partner, Wally, from AIDS. He describes his life in New York with them in precise, vivid prose, and asks questions about love for another being very different from ourselves, about sentimentality, death and happiness. It ranges very widely and even includes a poem by Emily Dickinson. You can hear a reading of Doty’s poem about dogs, ‘Golden Retrievals’ on You Tube (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fhbLHiUPx7Q). He is one of the US’ best known gay poets and has published 12 books of poetry - we hope to add some of them to the archive collection. ***rbooks ***rs

Tove Jansson, artist, writer, illustrator and muralist (and she had other talents) became famous for her children’s seri...
09/08/2026

Tove Jansson, artist, writer, illustrator and muralist (and she had other talents) became famous for her children’s series about the Moomins, which has been translated into 45 languages and adapted as a play, a film, and an opera. She also wrote six novels and five short story collections for adults - the best known is The Summer Book (part of the archive collection). The Moomin series followed the adventures of the creatures of Moomin Valley, who had large snouts and looked rather like hippos - they began as stories of danger and narrow escapes, but evolved to take in serious themes such as loneliness which are closer to writing for adults. Tove Jansson’s relationships evolved as well - originally bisexual, she became more drawn to women and said she had ‘gone over to the spook side,’ a way of describing q***rness at the time. In 2021, the Tove Festival in Helsinki held a discussion about possible q***r themes in Tovel’s work - you can read about the conversation on her website, Tove Jansson.com. It’s also full of photos of Jansson and her art. ***rbooks

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