Isabel Waidner

Dr Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their novels We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Gaudy Bauble (2017) were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize (2x), and won the Internationale Literaturpreis. Waidner is a co-founder (with Richard Porter) of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and the programmer and presenter of This isn’t a Dream, a literary talk series, also with the ICA. They are the editor of Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Writing (2018), and their next novel Sterling Karat Gold is forthcoming with Peninsula Press in June 2021.

PhD (Creative Writing), Roehampton University

I welcome inquiries from prospective research students in the areas of formally innovative and interdisciplinary writing, and creative writing at the intersections with cultural theory, performance, visual art, and queer/trans theory.

Current PhD students:

D. Mortimer: Queer Metamorphosis: A Creative and Critical Investigation

Hannah Levene: A Butch and Tender Archive

Odhran O'Donoghue: The ‘Gay Future Child’: an analysis of homonormativity and assimilation in contemporary American LGBT+ young adult fiction

Kole Fulmine: On Neutral, Trans Athleticism and Writing

Sterling Karat Gold (2021) is Kafka’s The Trial written for the era of gaslighting – a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies. Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world, Sterling – with the help of their three best friends – must defy bullfighters, football players and spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Following the Goldsmiths Prize–nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner’s latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards fiercer futures.

We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019) is an innovative and critically British novel, taking issue with the dream of national belonging. Set on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England, it collides literary aesthetics with contemporary working class cultures and attitudes (B.S. Johnson and Reebok classics), works with themes of empire, embodiment and resistance, and interrogates autobiographical material including the queer migrant experience.

Liberating the Canon (ed., 2018) is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of writing in the UK and beyond. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this. Edited by Isabel Waidner, LTC includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts: Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, Steven J. Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D. Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.