Maryville: a dyke bar revival with Joelle Taylor [Radical Book Fair]

Join us for our opening event of 2025's Radical Book Fair! What better way to kick of our festival days of love, joy, rage and political revolution than an event with none other than award winning poet and beloved favourite Joelle Taylor!

Joelle's new book centers around the fictional Maryville Dyke Bar, celebrating and examining the scars, hopes, dreams and potentials of the queer underground and dyke counterculture.

For this event we'll be (re)creating the Maryville within the Roxy, with a lively bar, dim lighting and lots of wee candlelit tables...

-- The Book --

Researched at the Bishopsgate Institute's LGBT+ LAGNA archives, Joelle renders the Maryville bar and its inhabitants in awe-inspiring high-definition poetry: as a television series, a prayer, an insurrection.

Joelle transplants the four butches introduced in C+NTO, into London's Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers – an imagined space that blends the now-endangered London dyke pubs of Joell's youth. They bring with them stories of incarceration, escape and resilience: a quality that will mark their friendship over the next 50 years. Through the Maryville’s darkened windows, and accompanied by a decades-spanning soundtrack, we watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women’s liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture’s wild spread across the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much more.

Our Speaker:

Joelle Taylor is the author of four collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television screenplay.

She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is a Poetry Fellow of the University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023 and has judged several poetry and literary prizes. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year.