LGBTQI+ Emerging Writer Commissions

Aislinn Evans started in poetry, had a love affair with comics, a rather dramatic divorce with both, and now is something of an essayist. Her work concerns intimate and personal explorations of the built environment, a queer phenomenology of place, class struggle, and the failure of memory. Her practise can be defined as somewhat restless, formally ambiguous, and a tad confrontational. She makes videos and stuff too.

Aislinn said: “It’s an honour to receive this commission, which will give me the time and space to build my writing practice into something deliberate, considered, and integrated into a wider world of creative nonfiction.” 

Conan Tan is a queer poet. He is the winner of the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize, Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition, and a finalist in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2025 Frontier Poetry Hurt and Healing Prize. He has received support from various organizations including Sing Lit Station, Poetry Translation Centre UK, the Transylvania County Library Foundation, and the Barbican Centre as a 2025 Barbican Young Poet. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Passages North, Salt Hill, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. 

Conan said: “I’m really honoured to be selected for this commission. A large part of my writing centres on the intersectional politics of queerness and race, and how queerness itself, like water, is fluid yet intrinsic to my identity, so I’m excited to receive professional support to expand on these ideas in my writing.”

Finn Brown’s (they/ them) writing lives in publications including Queer Life, Queer Love 2(Muswell Press), The Raven Review, Booth Journal, Annie Journal, Meniscus Journal, The Bombay Review, The Bittersweet Review and Snowflake Magazine. Their writing has also been shortlisted for the Creative Future 2024 Writers’ Award and commended for the Moth Short Story Prize 2025. They are an editor, curator and designer at queer and trans-led press t’ART. 

Liam Konemann is a music journalist and book marketer based in North London. A reformed Australian, he holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Queensland University of Technology. He moved to London in 2013, where he became promptly and irrevocably entangled in the music industry. His music journalism has appeared in Loud and Quiet, DIY, and Dork, and his prose poetry has been published by Five:2:One. The Arena of the Unwell is his first novel, exploring queer longing, music fandom, and mental illness.  

Remi Graves is a London-based poet and drummer. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work has been commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral, Arthouse Jersey and bbc Radio 4. They have led courses at The Poetry School and facilitate in schools and community spaces around London. Remi was longlisted for the Merky Books New Writers’ Prize in 2020 and their debut pamphlet, with your chest, was published by fourteen poems in 2022. Their pamphlet coal was awarded the Prototype Prize / Short-Form Category, 2024.