Holly Edwards: 'There's obviously something political about presenting trans characters'

Diana Evans, Bruna Martini and Joel Cox have already joined us on this Spring series of podcasts, and next time we'll be hearing from Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood. But this time we welcome Holly Edwards.The country comes calling in her short story Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? But Edwards has always lived in the city, so she doesn't have a store of memories to draw on."What I have is – from very much an urbanite's perspective – an obsession with what it must be like to live in the countryside," she says, "ever since I was a child. And as part of that I have watched hours of shows like This Farming Life and River Cottage."The story follows Rose as she reconnects with her roots, the author continues, with much of the detail taken from those sessions. "I'm often eating my dinner while watching people lambing on telly."For Edwards, the comfortable rural life portrayed in TV documentaries is altered by viewing it through the queer lens."I don't consciously set out to queer a story," she says, "but that's how I perceive the world and so I'll often have queer characters or queer perspectives in my stories."Queerness is inherent in Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? with the tension between Rose and her father coming from his discomfort with her transition, Edwards explains, but she didn't want to write a "battle cry"."There's obviously something political about presenting trans characters and trans lives," she says, "I think that's inescapable." There's something inherently political about presenting all sorts of queer lives, she adds, "but it wasn't my intention when writing it".Rose's father may have started out as the bad guy, Edwards says, but she knew from the start that it wasn't that simple."As a queer writer, I do feel a responsibility to portray the complexities and the intricacies and the beauty of queer lives. Fiction definitely has an important role in helping people across the spectrum understand each other."We'll be exploring the convolutions of memory next time with Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.