A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War. In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories and colonial trauma alongside the psychological and erotic lives of its characters as their identities are shaped, but refused to be suppressed, by the bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system. 

Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. He spent his early life in a refugee camp in Sudan, and his early teens in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He arrived in London as an underage unaccompanied refugee without a word of English and went on to earn an MA in Development Studies from SOAS and a BSc in Economics from UCL. His first novel, The Consequences of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2008), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into more than 20 languages. His second novel, Silence is My Mother Tongue (Indigo Press, 2019; Graywolf, 2020), was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2021, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, the inaugural African Literary Award from The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Fiction. Addonia’s essays appear in LitHub, Granta, Freeman’s, The New York Times, De Standaard and Passa Porta. He is a contributor to Tales of Two Planets (Penguin, 2020) and Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books, 2020). 

Highly acclaimed in Denmark, Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless?

With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal – a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.

Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times.

WINNER OF THE 2023 DANISH CRITICS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE DR NOVEL PRIZE, MONTANA’S LITERATURE PRIZE & THE JYLLANDS-POSTEN FICTION PRIZE

Cecilie Lind (b. 1991) studied at Forfatterskolen (The Danish Academy of Creative Writing), and debuted in 2010 with The Wolf Ate My Eyeliner. Lind’s breakthrough in Denmark came with the publication of the highly acclaimed book-length poem My Child, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Critic’s Prize and the Politiken’s Literary Award. She was awarded The Native Language Prize in 2020, and Girlbeast won the Danish Critics Prize in 2023. Lind’s most recent novel, Bristefærdig (Ripe), was published to critical acclaim in 2025.

Hazel Evans (b. 1994) is an artist, writer and literary translator based near Aarhus, Denmark. She was the 2022/23 emerging translator for Danish to English at the National Centre for Writing, and her debut translation, Into a Star by Puk Qvortrup, was published by Hamish Hamilton. In 2024, she received The Inger and Jens Bruun Translation Prize for her translation of Rasmus Daugbjerg’s Troll, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations, encompassing portraits, descriptions and ruminations on mountains, hotels, people, language, food, flora and fauna.

Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat.

In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen.

Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

An anthology of queer erotic sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. 

In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms.

From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss.

Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

Featuring stories from: Gracie Beswick, Swithun Cooper, Rachel Dawson, Rien Gray, Vivien Holmes, Jem Nash, Diriye Osman, Alison Rumfitt, Nicks Walker & Anna Walsh.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.

catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.