Aberdeen Queer Arts Festival: Re-writing Queer Relationships in Literature

Ashley Douglas (she/her) is a multi-lingual historian, translator and consultant, specialising in LGBT+ history and the Scots language. She is from Edinburgh, where she lives with her wife, Eilidh. Ashley has worked with and written for the National Library of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, Time for Inclusive Education, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the British Library. Ashley is the author of The Lass and The Quine (2025), the first ever original LGBT+ inclusive children’s book in Scots. Her first adult non-fiction book, a historical biography of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s Sixteenth Century Sappho, will be published next year (summer 2026).

Chitra Ramaswamy is a British journalist of South Asian descent. Her books are Homelands: The History of a Friendship, published by Canongate books and Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, published by Saraband. Ramaswamy is currently a restaurant critic in Scotland for the Alba supplement in the Scottish edition of The Sunday Times.  She was one of the Guardian’s TV reviewers.

Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the story collection No & Other Love Stories and the memoir The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. She is also the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

Cailean Steed is a writer and teacher who lives near Glasgow with their husband, son, and dog Tayto. Their debut novel Home was published by Raven Bloomsbury in 2023, and their second novel, The Mirror Halls, will be published in 2026 by Hachette. Cailean’s short stories have been published in anthologies such as New Writing Scotland and Boudicca Press’s Disturbing the Beast. Their audiodrama RealBoy was the winner of the 2020 Pen to Print Audioplay Award.

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