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Pride Reading Recommendations

Pride Reading Recommendations

Check out our list of reading recommendations to keep the Pride celebrations going!  

 

The Journey is Home book coverThe Journey is Home: Notes from Life on the Edge by John Sam Jones
John Sam Jones' powerful memoir about life on the edge. It is story of journeys and realisation, of acceptance and joy. From closeted boyhood in coastal Wales, to studying in Berkley in California as the AIDS epidemic took hold, before returning to Liverpool and north Wales to work in chaplaincy, education, and sexual health. A journey of becoming a writer and chronicler of his experiences with award-winning books and the somewhat reluctant compulsion to become a campaigner for LGBT+ rights in Wales.  

 

"...an incredibly important insight into the lives of individuals who had to inhabit the far less hospitable and more openly homophobic world of the recent past." - The Welsh Agenda

 

Queer Square Mile: Queer Short Stories from Wales, edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan and Huw Osborne

This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation.

The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018).

Read more here.

"It’s a great collection for picking and choosing a tale to fit your mood and ambition, or to follow the sweep of both change and immutability in this particular patch of our histories." - Nation Cymru 

 

the last polar bear on earth by Rhian Elizabeth

Some poems about being sick and being in love. Two things that are one and the same. 

the last polar bear on earth charts the fallout after the writer’s diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. The collection also covers relationships, online dating, sex, polar bears and motherhood with an honest frankness and a dry and self-depreciating humour.

Read more here.

"From motherhood to Joan Baez, internet dating to the inside of an MRI machine, Rhian Elizabeth’s moving and often witty poems cover a range of subjects....Brave and unflinchingly honest, these are poems of the greatest importance and achievement." – Jonathan Edwards

 

Brando's Bride by Sarah Broughton

The incredibly true story of Anna Kashfi and her marriage to Hollywood’s greatest star Marlon Brando.

Read more here.

‘There will not be a better written, more understanding and forensically researched biography published this year.’ Roger Lewis, The Daily Mail

‘Glamorous and gritty by turns... an absorbing and entirely fascinating read...’ Mab Jones, Buzz

 

Between Worlds: A Queer Boy from the Valleys by Jeffrey Weeks.

Jeffrey Weeks has been called ‘the most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s’. Yet behind the titles and acclaim lies the story of a hugely fascinating, inspirational life – one both immersed in love and blighted by pain and loss. 

Between Worlds is an informative, moving and intimate history of how juxtaposing communities shaped one man from the Rhondda.

Read more here.

"Beautifully written, wise and insightful." Western Mail

Kiss and Tell: Selected Stories by John Sam Jones

Selected for the first time in a single new edition, these sensual stories by prize-winning author John Sam Jones reveal lucid prose and complex lives. Moving through city steam rooms, rugged North Wales mountains and estuaries facing other places. Risky sex, new romance and easy understanding, a mortgage on a semi or keeping a lid on it all for the sake family, status and belief...

Including previously unseen work, and a foreword by David Llewellyn.

 Read more here.