Programmarchiv

Reading and discussion with Jane Flett, Sarah Van Bonn and Ambika Thompson

It’s the summer of ’97 and the Scottish town of Pitlaw is itching for change.
Enter the Freakslaw – a travelling funfair populated by deviant queers, a contortionist witch, the most powerful fortune teller, and other architects of mayhem. It doesn’t take long for the Freakslaw folk to infiltrate Pitlaw’s grey world, where the town’s teenagers – none more so than Ruth and Derek – are seduced by neon charms and the possibility of escape.
But beneath it all, these newcomers are harbouring a darker desire: revenge.
And as tensions reach fever pitch between the stoic locals and the dazzling intruders, a violence that’s been simmering for centuries is about to be unleashed.

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Described by Chelsea G. Summers as “the glittery punk offspring of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, Freakslaw is a queer literary horror about chosen family and the risks it takes to become the person you want to be.

Jane Flett will be in conversation with Sarah Van Bonn about toxic masculinity, maximalist joy,and the importance of queer excess.
The night will feature an opening reading from Ambika Thompson, and end with an audience Q&A and book signing.
Books will be for sale from the bookshop Curious Fox!

Jane Flett is a Scottish writer who lives in Berlin. Her fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4, featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She’s a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, the New Orleans Writing Residency and the Berlin Senate Stipend for non-German literature. Freakslaw is her first novel.

https://www.instagram.com/thejaneflett/

Sarah Van Bonn is a Berlin-based writer whose fiction and nonfiction have been widely published in literary magazines, including PANK, The Common, The Southampton Review, Columbia Journal, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Her essay ‘On Bears’ was shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize.
https://sarahvanbonn.com/

Ambika Thompson (they/them) has been published in Electric Literature, Riddle Fence, Crab Fat Magazine, Fanzine, Joyland, The Fiddlehead and PANK. They have an MFA in creative writing from Guelph University, are a fiction editor at Berlin’s SAND journal, and are one-half of the Riot Grrrl cello duo Razor Cunts.
https://www.instagram.com/thereaderberlin/