This week Gillian meets Kestrel Gaian and has a wide-ranging conversation around creativity, writing poetry and books as well as bringing stories and narratives to life where Queerness is the least interesting thing about people. They also discuss the process of choosing names!
Kestral Gaian is an author, poet, playwright, activist, and professional overthinker. Their work spans fiction, poetry, theatre, audio, music, and video games, and they have a particular interest in telling positive stories about queer lives, poking at broken systems, and seeing what people can build together when the rules stop making sense.
They believe kindness is more interesting than cruelty, that stories should leave room for mischief, and that most problems can be solved by eating a good sandwich.
Their books include The Boy From Elsewhere, the first novel in the Reality Quake saga, and acclaimed poetry collection Tubelines. Across their work, Kestral returns to queer lives, memory, grief, community, and systems that have forgotten the people they are supposed to serve. Their characters tend to notice the machinery behind ordinary life and decide, usually at considerable inconvenience to themselves, to interfere with it.
Kestral grew up on a council estate with very few people like them reflected in books or on television. Storytelling became a way to find missing possibilities and create their own role models, which sounds far better than calling them imaginary friends. Their work combines imagination, emotional honesty, and political bite, with a strong thread of kindness being more interesting than cruelty. They like jokes in serious places, tenderness that has earned its place, and stories in which survival means more than reaching the final page. You can find out more at https://kestr.al/
You can contact us at gillian@transvox.co.uk and find out more at transvox.co.uk