SADLY THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO A SPEAKER COMING DOWN WITH COVID. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE SOON. THOSE WITH TICKETS WILL BE REIMBURSED.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING!

Housmans are delighted to hand the shop floor over to Kate Hardie and So Mayer who will be talking about about how they both use genre fiction to tell hard truths, finding queer and feminist form for personal stories. We are also happy to be celebrating the paperback launch of Kate’s brilliant and haunting debut novel This Is Where We Live. Described in The Independent as ‘the most gripping account of motherhood since Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work’ This Is Where We Live is a masterful work of contemporary, and subtle, gothic fiction: A single mother wakes to blood in her mouth and flesh under her fingernails. A severed toe on the doorstep. A boy missing. But her child needs to get to school. There’s a food shop to be done. Parents evenings, play dates and pasta for tea. Raising her child alone, she’s done all she can to protect them. But what if she’s the thing they need protecting from the most?

Kate’s interlocuter for the evening will be the inimitable So Mayer, whose most recent work is the acclaimed short story collection Truth or Dare: a queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always.

Our speakers:

Kate Hardie is an actor and screenwriter, her acting work includes The Krays, Mona Lisa, the award winning Safe and more recently National Treasure. She has written and directed for Channel Four The BFI and Sky and is due to direct her first feature. She has also taught screen writing and directing, lectured and advised on representation and diversity within the film industry, and written essays and articles for the Guardian and Dazed. She is mother to one and lives in London with her husband. This Is Where We Live is her debut novel.

So Mayer is a writer, indie bookseller, film curator, and pencil stan. Their most recent books are A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), a short essay on queer art, censorship and resistance, and <jacked a kaddish> (Litmus, 2018), a poetry sequence about interwar masculinity, technology and hats, and their BFI Film Classics on Orlando is forthcoming. Their work across genres and forms has been published internationally, including in Roxane Gay’s anthology Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, in several Criterion DVDs, and in Ignota Press’s Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry. Plus their poetry once appeared on hoardings in Dublin. With Adam Zmith, they collaborated on Unreal Sex for Cipher, an anthology of queer SFFH, and on the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can’t See, a tour through queer film history.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose book + event entry, your copy of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or have it delivered, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 7pm, Event Starts 7:30