The longlist has been revealed for the Polari First Book Prize 2024, which includes Adam Lowe's debut collection Patterflash.
Adam said, "I am honoured to be in the company of such stellar writers! This is an extremely competitive longlist, so to even place is fantastic news."
The shortlist will be announced on Monday 30 September and the winners’ ceremony will be held at the British Library on Tuesday 29 November.
Polari First Book Prize 2024 longlist
Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson (John Murray)
Local Fires by Joshua Jones (Parthian Books)
Sunburn by Chloe Michelle (Verve Books)
A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar by Harry Nicholas (JKP)
Patterflash by Adam Lowe (Peepal Tree Press)
Bellies by Nicola Dinan (Penguin)
Greekling by Kostya Tsolakis (Nine Arches Press)
Transitional: In One Way or Another, We All Transition by Munroe Bergdorf (Bloomsbury)
Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants by Paul David Gould (Unbound)
Rosewater by Liv Little (Dialogue)
The judges are author Rachel Holmes, author and writing coach Karen McLeod, author Jon Ransom (Polari Prize winner 2023), Co-chair of Spread The Word Simon Richardson and author Paul Burston (chair).
Judge Jon Ransom said, “This is an exciting and diverse longlist, representing the very best of LGBTQ+ writing today.”
About Patterflash
Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm – as well as the comedic. Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar.
The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of “Adam Lowe” as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises. What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy inhis mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde woman’s wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash.
About the Polari Prize
The Polari Prize is the UK and Ireland’s only dedicated LGBTQ+ book prize, founded by author and activist Paul Burston. The Polari First Book Prize was launched to celebrate debut writers in 2011. The Polari Prize was launched in 2019 to celebrate writers at any stage of their career. Previous winners include Fiona Mozley, Saleem Haddad, Paul McVeigh, Kirsty Logan, Diriye Osman, John McCullough, Mari Hannah, James Maker, Angela Chadwick, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Mohsin Zaidi, Adam Zmith and Jon Ransom.
