Created as part of British Council’s India/UK Together Season of Culture 2022, Language is a Queer Thing is an international poetry development programme engaging LGBTQIA+ poets, poetry professionals and communities in India and the UK. Spearheaded by The Queer Muslim Project in collaboration with Verve Poetry Festival, the project has emerged as the only exchange programme of its kind bringing together LGBTQIA+ talent from South Asia and the UK and creating sustainable pathways for cross-border collaborations and creative dialogue between artists and institutions in India and the UK.
Since its inception, the project has brought together 12 emerging LGBTQIA+ spoken word poets from India and the UK to collaborate, create new work and share it with audiences in both the countries with the support of British Council. The poets performed live and on radio, held panel discussions and met with communities to create legacy work addressing shared global challenges through the lens of equality, diversity and inclusion, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and accessibility for underrepresented artists and creative practitioners from LGBTQIA+ communities.Till date, the project has reached over 2 million listeners via BBC Radio programmes and in-person audiences at mainstream literary festivals - BBC Contains Strong Language in Birmingham and Leeds, and Tata Literature Live and Spoken Fest in Mumbai, and Jaipur Literature Festival.
2024
Following the success of the 2022-23 initiative, British Council is delighted to continue our support for the Language is A Queer Thing poetry exchange in 2024-25. This dynamic project unites six LGBTQIA+ poets—three from India and three from the UK—who will collaborate and create new works to be presented at Artshila Shantiniketan on Wednesday 22 January 2025 followed by Kolkata Literary Meet on Saturday 25 January 2025 at 11.30am.
Selected through an open call, these are the poets for 2024.
INDIA
Parth Rahatekar (They/Them, Pune) - Parth is a poet and writer from Pune, currently based in Melbourne. Their work interrogates systems of violence and creates worlds of vibrancy, love and healing. Parth's poems have featured across stages, galleries and publications in India and the world—including the ISCP, New York, The narrm ngarrgu Library, The Brighton Centre of Contemporary Art, Vogue India, ASAP Art amongst others. Their debut collection—Midnights, Parth's Version toured across venues in India and Melbourne. Currently, they are tinkering with various revelations while pursuing a Master's in publishing.
Aadrit Banerjee (He/Him, Kolkata) - Aadrit’s poetry has been published by the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, DoubleSpeak Magazine, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, The Blacksheep, and other literary platforms. Born and raised in Kolkata, and currently based out of Delhi, he has been a research fellow with Wikimedia Foundation and The Heritage Lab, and Nazariya Foundation, working in the field of community-oriented heritage conservation from an intersectional gender and sexualities studies discipline. A regular in the slam poetry circuit, his spoken word performances have been featured by PoemsIndia and Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival. He is currently pursuing a Master’s in English Literature from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi.
Sara Haque (She/They, Assam) - Sara is a 26 year old queer Muslim writer-poet from the riverside town of Goalpara, India. Their work centres around queerness, faith, memory, language and geo-political marginalizations, via poetry, prose and other artistic mediums, and has been published in national level poetry magazines and books. Sara has been a spoken word artist since 2017, and also a 2024 fellow of "The Queer Writers' Room" by The Queer Muslim Project. Most recently, two of their works were published in "Riverside Stories", a feminist anthology from Assam, by Zubaan books. Being a literature and film major, they also work with translation and film theory, and have had academic publications around the same.
UK
Kirran Shah (She/They, Bradford) - Kirran Shah is a Writer, Creative Facilitator, Arts Producer and Broadcast Journalist. She was Co-Chair of Bradford’s Cultural Voice Forum and an ambassador for Bradford City of Culture 2025. She has a background in arts consultancy, corporate governance, research, Art History, museums, policy, data analysis and cultural strategy. She produces podcasts and narrative-led documentaries about arts and culture for BBC National and local radio, and chairs, hosts and facilitates live events and broadcasts for diverse literature festivals across the country. In 2019 she produced ‘Out Loud’, a BBC Radio 4 documentary exploring Bradford’s emerging spoken-word counter culture, people-powered leadership, fearless activists and the radical spaces where people were speaking their truth. She is passionate about social change through amplifying marginalised voices and creating platforms for creative expression and wellbeing initiatives.
Abu Leila (They/She, London) - Abu Leila is a queer Arab writer and community organiser, interested in the role of literature in social movements. They are a Barbican Young Poet, and one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards. Their work, preserving histories of anti-imperialist resistance in South Lebanon, has been shortlisted for the 2024 Wasafiri new writing prize. They have written theatre shows preserving oral family histories of war for the Camden People’s Theatre and the North Wall. They have been commissioned by Poet in the City and anthologised in Bad Betty Press' field notes on survival and the other side of hope. They are currently writing their first novel, an extract from which won the Bridport Prize's Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2022. Abu Leila hopes to see the fall of capitalism and imperialism in their lifetime.
Ray Vincent-Mills (He/It, Birmingham) - Ray is a poet, performer, facilitator, organiser and eavesdropper based in Birmingham.BLACK, trans, queer and fortunate he is interested in provoking discomfort in audiences and himself with his work. Themes include: Identity, the body, food and links between consumption and perception. He has performed in bars, cafes, restaurants, theatres, streets, a bathroom, a barn, a kitchen and once outside a Tesco (express) because a man asked very nicely. It is endlessly inspired by the Birmingham art scene, hip hop, his chosen family & desserts. He is claiming this is the year of being a baby at things which has manifested in papermaking, experiments with performance art and conquering his fear of deep frying. Ray is a member of the Roundhouse collective, and is currently working on a Participatory performance piece THE EXAM by THE ARTIST supported by multiverse Eastside projects. It is currently pretty content with life (!)