TLC is delighted to announce the tenth cohort of writers selected from submissions open to LGBTQ+ writers, run during Pride month each year. The LGBTQ+ Free Reads scheme advocates for better representation and access in the worlds of literature and publishing.
As always, the quality of submissions was incredibly high, and it was as tough as ever for our filter readers to select a final five writers. The winners will receive free professional feedback on the first 15,000 words of their novels or novels-in progress from novelist, writing tutor and TLC Editor Michael Langan.
This year, all applicants will be invited to a reading and Q&A with Michael, as well as a Masterclass on Editing led by award-winning writer Christina Fonthes.
This is the tenth year the scheme is running, with several of our alumni now represented by major literary agencies and securing publishing deals. The scheme has so far supported 50 writers with prizes, and hundreds of applicants from the UK’s LGBTQ+ writing community.
I was thrilled this year by the highest number of entries yet and very excited by the standard of what I was reading. It feels to me that more and more LGBTQ+ writers are finding a voice that’s true to them, that articulates what they dream of saying, instead of, or as well as, writing with industry expectations in their minds. I hope this is true, especially now when LGBTQ+ themed books, especially those for young people and children, are being targeted and, in some cases, actively withdrawn. We have to keep resisting this and the more of us there are writing the harder we are to collectively ignore or suppress. I want to thank and pay tribute to ALL those who submitted work and urge every one to keep at it. Your stories deserve to be told.
– Michael Langan, Patron
Three of the opening extract assessments are funded through the TLC Free Reads scheme (supported by Arts Council England), with two donated by Michael himself. We look forward to supporting another cohort of talented writers through our open applications. All applicants will be invited to an exclusive Q&A webinar with Michael, an Editing Masterclass with Christina Fonthes. The five winning writers will also receive a free day pass to the Coast is Queer Festival.
We are extremely grateful to Michael for making this scheme possible once again in this very special tenth year – and our huge congratulations to the winners, who are showcased below!
Adam Perchard
Adam Perchard is a writer, visual artist, and cabaret performer. They have performed their work on Channel 4 and at the London Coliseum, National Theatre, Soho Theatre, and Hackney Empire. Their song cycle Interview with The Vamp, written and performed with Olivier Award-winning composer Richard Thomas, had a hit run at the Soho Theatre and will tour internationally in 2027. Their sculpture ‘Our Hands,’ remembering the victims of Jersey’s historic witch trials, is on permanent exhibition at the Jersey Museum. They have just won the 2026 Hogarth Art Prize for two of their illustrations from their debut novel London Fluid.
Adam says: LGBTQ+ representation has never been more important, but the literary marketplace is loud and crowded and pretty scary for a first-timer like me! That’s why this chance to have my voice amplified, refined, and supported by TLC is so wonderful.
I’m a non-binary cabaret performer, and I grew up in the underworld of London’s chemsex scene. Many of my friends are beautiful drag creatures, trans women, people of colour, immigrants, sex workers, and lost boys. This book is for them. I want us to have a literary novel of our own.
About the Book: London Fluid is a non-binary epic about queer, Black, and immigrant communities in London. Weaving between the Renaissance and the present day, it teems with almost 500 of my original drawings and paintings. It joins us back up with our forgotten histories and our place in ancient myth, and places us back in the centre of British history and identity.
When Sweeting, the lonely queer son of the River Thames, meets mortal dockworker Tom, he finds acceptance and joy in a Renaissance London full of historically-existing queer and Black Londoners. In the present day, things are bleaker: the immortal Sweeting and his mortal friends are being crushed by prejudice in a London simmering with injustice and political protests. They bring together the metropolis’s underdogs in a bold plan to flood the city and wrest control from the privileged few. But what kind of London will emerge from the floodwaters? Will it remain patriarchal, rigid, and unjust – or will it become fluid, queer, metamorphic, free?
Albeniz Dias
Albee Clay Dias was born in Rio de Janeiro; he lived in Brazil, Spain, France and Finland, and has been living in the United Kingdom for over twenty years. He is a painter and writer, and lives and works in Oxford. A mixed-race queer artist, father, and avid reader in different languages, he holds a BA in Arts and Humanities from The Open University and a MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He went to the Sao Paulo, Barcelona, and La Sorbonne Universities to study Languages and Literature but dropped it out due to migration.
Albeniz says: Being selected as one of the winners of the TBC LGBTQ+ Free Read has provided the encouragement I have been seeking. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to develop this collection and to benefit from the mentorship program as I continue to refine my creative practice.
About the book: Mules, the Interpreter, and Some Picassos is a collection that explores crime and justice, guilt and freedom, drugs and human trafficking, borders, and the people who cross them. It approaches borders not only as geographical frontiers between the Global South and the Global North, but also as the shifting boundaries of gender and sexuality. The collection belongs to a distinctly contemporary literary tradition: fragmented, polyphonic, transnational, queer, documentary-inflected, morally ambiguous, and inherently political.
The stories unfold across Europe (Barcelona, Paris, Málaga, London), Africa (Equatorial Guinea, Maroc), and South America (Brazil, Colombia, and French Guiana). These places function not merely as settings, but as both imagined landscapes and political machinery, shaping the lives of those who move through them.
The title itself establishes a tension between crime, migration, art, morality, and subjectivity. It carries a quiet irony: bodies become containers in situations of desperation, language becomes an instrument of mediation, and art offers both the possibility of transcendence and the illusion of escape.
The collection is not simply about criminality; it is about the systems that produce illegality—poverty, borders, desire, gender, survival, and translation itself. Rather than speaking about social issues in the abstract, these stories focus on the people caught within those systems.
Andrea Mbarushimana
Best known for her poetry, Andrea Mbarushimana has published three books with indie presses KFS, Silhouette and Hedgehog and is Coventry’s current Poet Laureate. Her short fiction can be found in anthologies from Comma Press and the Emma Press. Andrea loves collaborating with organisations such as Talking Birds and with other creatives for projects including the animated Digi Poems, supported by the British Council. Andrea is passionate about community storytelling, and an avid reader of fantasy and scifi. An Arts Council England DYCP grant began her journey as a novelist and Kith is her first novel.
Andrea says: It’s a cliché that your first novel is part autobiography, but Manda’s journey of self discovery is in some way much smoother than mine and in some ways much, much more rocky! I’ve struggled with a queer identity for many years – not liking to be boxed, feeling imposter syndrome, not feeling like I fit in anywhere. This is the first time I’ve openly gone for any kind of queer related tangible thing, so it feels huge for me to have won this TLC x Michael Langan LGBTQ+ Free Read. I am so excited about it. I am really proud of my characters and the story I’m telling in this novel. Manda and Karl are unconventional and proud, like I am slowly learning to be.
About the Book: Kith is my first novel. An urban fantasy thriller, it follows four characters who meet through a kidnapping in an alternative, virus infected UK. Dealing with strange mutated virus victims and ancient, hidden families of vampires called Kith, querying her identity is the last thing on protagonist Manda’s mind. But you can find your people in the most unlikely of circumstances and suddenly, everything makes sense, even as the world falls apart.
Emily Phipps
Em Claire (Emily Phipps) disabled LGBTQ+ writer and poet based in the East Midlands. Her work explores chronic illness, disability, identity, and everyday life through memoir and poetry. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sick Note. Her current projects include the poetry collections More Than Just a Hospital Number and Ordinary, Somehow. Following a near-death experience, Em committed fully to her writing practice with unwavering clarity, courage, and purpose. She writes with raw authenticity, dark humour, and emotional honesty, creating contemporary work that refuses to look away from the realities of illness, survival, and ordinary life.
Emily says: Winning an LGBTQ+ Free Read through The Literary Consultancy is a transformative milestone for this project. Having the opening of this deeply personal and unapologetically queer manuscript recognised by industry professionals is extraordinary validation. As a regional writer, access to expert editorial insight provides a vital bridge towards developing the manuscript and sharing a narrative that is too often sidelined.
This recognition reinforces why I write: to amplify underrepresented voices, puncture medical pretence, and tell the truth about illness without making it palatable. I want to create work that gives readers language for experiences they may have struggled to articulate and insists that disabled, queer, and chronically ill lives deserve space on the page.
About the book: As a disabled LGBTQ+ writer based in the East Midlands, my creative work is rooted in the intersections of identity, chronic illness, and survival. Living with the rare condition Fowler’s Syndrome has given me a front-row seat to the bureaucracy, indignity, and absurdity of the medical world. These realities demand an unflinching, darkly humorous lens rather than a sanitised story of inspiration.
That raw perspective forms the heartbeat of my forthcoming memoir, Sick Note. The book explores what it means to inhabit an unpredictable and sometimes failing body while navigating employment, healthcare, relationships, and the expectations placed upon disabled people. It challenges the stigma surrounding disability while celebrating queer identity, community, resilience, and radical honesty.
Jocelyn Watson
The Asian Women’s Writers Collective was Jocelyn Watson’s first writing home. She was one of the 200 British writers of colour celebrated in Breaking Ground. She has been a winner of the Asian Writer, Freedom from Torture, and other writing prizes. Her stories have been published by Dahlia, Honno, and Emerald Books, and others. Her first story Menaka was published in an anthology by New Lesbian Writers by Women’s Press. She writes because she believes literature can enable us to reflect upon all kinds of experiences, empowering us to become humane, thoughtful human beings, learning how precious our lives are.
Jocelyn Says: Winning the LGBTQ+ Free Read has provided me with an invaluable opportunity to help me achieve my ultimate goal getting my novel published, out there in the public domain for people to read about progressive alternatives and visions.
About the book: My novel The Unpredictability of Life is a contemporary, literary novel exploring the powerful golden thread of friendship binding a group of diverse older lesbians confronting the most demanding crises in their lives: betrayal, heartbreak, alcohol addiction, grief, illness and loneliness. The novel is about the resilience of this chosen family of women who embark on a revolutionary act of creating a supportive, joyful future on their own terms, proving that age is not an end but can be a new beginning. Having navigated their way through death, cancer and homophobic opposition to their project, they build a new life together, with new companions, in a purpose built, environmentally friendly, cohousing home, in a fictitious town – The Three Sisters Older Women’s Co-Housing. The novel is told through the point of view of each of the five main characters, Jaya, a mixed race Goan and British teacher, devastated when her partner, Nandita, suddenly leaves her. Jaya attempts suicide and recovers through the support of her friends: Wangari, a British Kenyan engineer, who is an alcoholic following being disfellowshipped for being a lesbian, Mari, also Goan and her partner Ni, a Pakistani, both artists, and a new friend, Ding, an IT expert forced to flee China because of her lesbianism.
