With Jenna Gordon, Elle Nash, Carrie Marshall and Seth Insua

The inaugural collection in the new VERVE Voices series, Queerphoria is a joyful and defiant queer-authored anthology proudly supporting Switchboard, the national LGBTQIA+ support line.

We are so delighted to be welcoming VERVE editor Jenna Gordon in conversation with Elle Nash, Carrie Marshall and Seth Insua to the shop for a queer voices extravaganza celebrating Queerphoria!

The book

Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby's arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment.

Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, thirty-one writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.

The speakers

Elle Nash (she/her) is a British-American author and editor known for her fearless exploration of desire, identity and the human condition. Her most recent novel, Deliver Me, is a ‘darkly vivid examination of faith, obsession and alienation’ and was longlisted for Fiction Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. She is also the author of debut novel Animals Eat Each Other (2018), the short story collection Nudes (2021) and the novella Gag Reflex (2022). Her work has appeared in Guernica, BOMB, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, Mslexia, The Spectator, Columbia Journal, Southwest Review, New York Tyrant and more. She is currently based in Glasgow.

Carrie Marshall (she/her) is a writer and musician whose latest critically acclaimed book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of LGBTQ+ music and musicians. Her trans memoir, Carrie Kills a Man, was shortlisted in the Discover category of the 2023 British Book Awards and was a Scotsman book of the year.

Seth Insua (he/they) is an Anglo-Spanish writer and artist. He was born in Kent in 1989. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a First in English Language

and Literature. His debut novel, Human, Animal, was published by VERVE Books in 2025 and Letras de Plata in Spanish the following year. It was selected for the BBC

Radio 2 Book Club with Sara Cox and shortlisted for the inaugural New Adult Book Prize and the 2026 Book of the Year: Discover Award at the British Book Awards. He lives with his husband, David, between Newcastle upon Tyne and Madrid.

The chair

Jenna Gordon is Editorial Director at VERVE Books, having joined VERVE in an editorial capacity in 2020. She works remotely from Glasgow and is a voracious reader of propulsive, character-driven fiction and voicy, thought-provoking non-fiction. Aside from books, her other loves include podcasts, long walks, yoga classes, TV dramas with 6-10 episodes, red wine and cats.

Description supplied by the event organiser.