This week I talked to poet, novelist and performance artist Joelle Taylor. Joelle is the author several works of poetry, including C+NTO – for which she won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2021 – which is both a memorial of and a tribute to the places and people that were part of the butch culture of the 90s in London. She has most recently published a novel – The Night Alphabet – which expands horizons and narratives to tell the story of violence done to women, weaving together narratives from the past with imagined futures to tell the story of the female body as the sight of experience, shared knowledge and resistance.  

In this conversation, we just straight into discussing The Night Alphabet, and how she imagined drawing together the stories of different people at different times to tell a story of violence.