Brilliance Books was a small publisher of gay and lesbian books based in Clerkenwell, London, [1] founded in 1982 [2] with funding from the GLC. [3] It published a range of fiction and non-fiction works [4] including David Wurtzel's Thomas Lyster: a Cambridge Novel [5] and Title Fight, the account of UK newspaper Gay News by Gillian E. Hanscombe [6] and its co-founder Andrew Lumsden. [7] It also re-published earlier works of gay and lesbian literature, [3] including Alice B. Toklas' The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book , [8] and a 1984 edition of The Chinese Garden by Rosemary Manning [9] originally published in 1961. [10]
The publisher was run by Roy Trevelion and Tenebris Light. [1] Author Jeanette Winterson worked as the women's editor there in 1983. [11]
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein.
Jeanette Winterson is an English author.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in October and November 1932 and published in 1933. It employs the form of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. In 1998, Modern Library ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian novelist, screenwriter, playwright and literary historian. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a novel by Jeanette Winterson published in 1985 by Pandora Press. It is a coming-of-age story about a lesbian who grows up in an English Pentecostal community. Key themes of the book include transition from youth to adulthood, complex family relationships, same-sex relationships, organised religion and the concept of faith.
Alice Priscilla Lyle Oswald is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. From 1 October 2019 until 30 September 2023, she was the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Adam Mars-Jones is a British novelist and literary and film critic.
Benjamin Myers FRSL is an English writer and journalist.
Patricia Olive "Pat" Kavanagh was a British literary agent.
Suniti Namjoshi is a poet and a fabulist. She grew up in India, worked in Canada and at present lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Her work is playful, inventive and often challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has written many collections of fables and poetry, several novels, and more than a dozen children's books. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
Alice Nutter was an English Recusant noblewoman accused and hanged as a result of the Pendle witch hunt. Her life and death are commemorated by a statue in the village of Roughlee in the Pendle district of Lancashire.
The Alice B Readers Award is given annually to living writers of lesbian fiction whose careers are distinguished by consistently well-written stories about lesbians. Named for Alice B. Toklas, the award is given once, only, in appreciation of career achievement. In addition to the medal, each recipient is given a lapel pin and a significant honorarium.
The Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club is a San Francisco-based association and political action committee for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Democrats.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
Hag-Seed is a novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, published in October 2016. A modern retelling of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, the novel was commissioned by Random House as part of its Hogarth Shakespeare series.
The Hogarth Shakespeare project was an effort by Hogarth Press to retell works by William Shakespeare for a more modern audience. To do this, Hogarth commissioned well-known writers to select and re-imagine the plays.
Frankissstein: A Love Story is a 2019 novel by Jeanette Winterson. It was published on 28 May 2019 by Jonathan Cape. The novel employs speculative fiction and historical fiction to reimagine Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (1818). The story switches between Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in Geneva, Switzerland in 1816 and the story of Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor and Victor Stein, a transhumanist, who become involved in the world of artificial intelligence and cryonics in present-day Brexit-era Britain.