This July, the UK celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride, as it has done for more than half a century.
The original London Pride march was held on 1 July 1972, a date chosen to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising – a series of protests in Greenwich Village following police violence at the Stonewall Inn, now seen as a watershed for the gay rights movement.
In honour of UK Pride Month 2023 – and to coincide with the announcement of this year’s British Book Awards winners – keep reading for your rundown of five recent and classic books by LGBTQ+ authors, perfect for adding to your summer reading list.
1. Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Woolf’s Orlando is a satirical look at the history of English literature. It’s also a family history of her partner of more than a decade, the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West.
Sackville-West’s son has described the novel as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”.
The story follows the eponymous hero, born as a nobleman before mysteriously changing sex in his thirties and living for more than 300 years without visibly ageing.
Living a life of high adventure, Orlando moves from the Elizabethan Age and the 1608 Frost Fair to the salon of poet and satirist Alexander Pope.
The novel was a huge success, both critically and within the general population, eager as they were for gossip on its thinly-veiled protagonist, Sackville-West.
2. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
James Baldwin’s 1953 debut novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of John Grimes. Growing up in 1930s Harlem, John and his family are wedded to the local church. John’s father, Gabriel, is a preacher there and John is destined to become one too.
Except that Gabriel rules his family through fear and religious fanaticism and John hates him, determining never to become like him.
Over a single day, this searing novel spans decades of family history, untangling the lies, sins, guilt and pride at the heart of the Grimes family.
Baldwin said of the novel: “I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.”
3. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
Like Tipping the Velvet, another of Waters’ best-known works, Fingersmith is set in Victorian England and follows the lives of two women from very different worlds.
Orphan Sue Trinder is taken in by a gang of thieves and taught everything they know. Struggling to break free of the poverty that surrounds her, she agrees to help a con man seduce a rich heiress to steal her fortune.
Trinder goes undercover as a maid for Maud Lilly, but who exactly is conning who?
With twists and turns aplenty, the book was made into an acclaimed BBC series in 205 and was also the basis for South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film, The Handmaiden.
4. Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong (2022)
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, best known for collections like his T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Night Sky with Exit Wounds and his debut novel, 2019’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Written as a letter to the narrator’s illiterate mother, the novel is a coming-of-age story that draws heavily from Vuong’s family history.
So too does his 2022 poetry collection, Time is a Mother, written following the death of his mother in 2019.
Vuong set out to “search for life after [her] death” and the resultant collection is an exploration of grief, unconditional love, and the joy of finding life again after loss.
5. All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir by Seán Hewitt (2022)
The Irish poet, lecturer, and critic Seán Hewitt won the Laurel Prize in 2021 for his debut poetry collection Tongues of Fire. He was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022 for All Down Darkness Wide.
When the author searches for a former lover on the internet, he expects to find nothing of the “internet sceptic” Jack. Instead, he finds a funeral notice. Jack’s death becomes the spark for this memoir that deals with Hewitt’s coming of age, coming out, and his relationship with Elias, a young man battling severe depression.
The pair meet while travelling in South America and are initially standoffish, eventually meeting again to start a relationship, first in Liverpool, and then in Gothenburg.
When Elias’s mental health suddenly worsens, the pair become trapped in a relationship that threatens to take more and more out of both of them, even as they become increasingly isolated from friends and family.
The memoir’s title is taken from a poem by Gerard Manley-Hopkins.
