Gloriously Queer - Nelson Arts Festival

Novelist Rebecca K Reilly (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Wai) - winner of the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction at the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards - and poet Rebecca Hawkes read from their stunning debut books.

Greta & Valdin, the beguiling and hilarious novel by Adam Foundation Prize winner Rebecca K Reilly, owes as much to Shakespeare as it does to Tinder. Set in a world that is deeply familiar (but also a bit sexier and more stylish than the real one), Greta and Valdin will speak to anyone who has had their heart broken, or has decided that they don’t want to be a physicist anymore, or has wondered about all of the things they don’t know about their family.

Meat Lovers is a poetry collection written, and illustrated, by acclaimed queer poet, painter and Canterbury farmer’s daughter, Rebecca Hawkes. In this dazzling collection, Hawkes takes a generous bite from the excesses of earthly flesh – first ‘Meat’, then ‘Lovers’. ‘Meat’ is a coming of age in which pony clubs, orphaned lambs and dairy-shed delirium are infused with playful menace and queer longings. Between bottle-fed care and killing-shed floors, the farm is a heady setting for love and death. In ‘Lovers’, the poet casts a wry eye over romance, from youthful sapphic infatuation to seething beastliness.

Content Warnings: Sexual references.

This event is part of the 2022 Nelson Arts Festival.