Poems engaging with the queer experience from the UK and India featuring Sanah Ahsan, Ife Grillo, Megha Harish, Anil Pradhan, Amani Saeed & Garfield D’Souza

Language is a Queer Thing is a project which pairs three India based queer poets with three UK based queer poets in an online exchange followed by two residencies – one in Birmigham leading into BBC Contains Strong Language Festival 2022, and one in Mumbai leading into Tata Literature Live! The project has been created and organised by VERVE Poetry Festival, Birmingham, and The Queer Muslim Project, Delhi and funded by British Council, India as part of its India:UK Cultural Echange Season.

As part of the online section of the exchange, and in response to online workshops and discussion forums, we asked our poets to produce poems alongside their partners to appear in this anthology and which will be performed to an audience, but also to each other, at the two festivals, one in the UK and one in India.

We have been thrilled with the results, as our poets have engaged with the subject of their own and each others’ queer experience, and worked to find ways of communicating with us and each other by queering the English language where possible. From joy to fear, from feeling misunderstood to feeling whole, the queer experience is portrayed and communicated in ways as varied as the poems that contain it.

We hope you learn something and feel something from engaging with these wonderful new works, as we have.