Now an annual event in celebration of Pride, Aesop’s ephemeral Queer Library returns to London this weekend to celebrate the transformative power of queer storytelling. Launched by a panel discussion in collaboration with A Vibe Called Tech at the Bishopsgate Institute at the beginning of June in celebration of Pride Month, this year’s library is titled Multiple Margins, focusing on the relationship between queer and racial identity. Curating a series of works which explore varying perspectives across the intersection of queer spaces, race and literature sees a list of chosen works from a myriad of authors whose voices share a unique perspective on the queer experience.

Jason Okundaye and Osman Yousefzada are just two of the names to note in Aesop’s selection this year, Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain is an extensive social history of Black Gay Britain few have ever dissected as closely before while Yousefzada’s The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds is a personal coming-of-age story set in Birmingham in the 1980s and 90s. Below, we asked the two authors and A Vibe Called Tech’s Lewis Dalton Gilbert and Charlene Prempeh to select their top picks from this year’s library.

Jason Okundaye, Author

Nothing Ever Just Disappears by Diarmuid Hester 
“I loved this book, which traced the lives of famous queer people through the homes and locations they settled in. It is wise and wonderfully evocative and makes you think about the imprints people leave on a place, many many years after they have gone.”

Lewis Dalton Gilbert, Creative Director of A Vibe Called Tech

I cannot be good until you say it by Saman Ahsan
“Aside from my very talented colleague and the amazing panellists we spoke with at the Queer Library launch, I have to say Sanah Ahsan’s poetry makes the whole world seem still and silent whilst simultaneously inspiring you to change it. Her words remind of poetry, prose and critical thinking authors of the past like Audre Lorde and Langston Hughes, despite her eloquently articulating how she feels about things happening in the present day.”

Osman Yousefzada, Author + Artist

Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz
“This piece of writing is relevant today as it was when it came out in the 80’s. An artist and also a writer, whose prose is like an electric shock. At some points you to have to re-read the sentences to unpack them – but it’s worth it as you hover over each word. It’s part memoir, part social history of the AIDS epidemic, and then laced with a hallucinatory world making of radical ideas of queerness, intersected with class. It’s an experimental masterpiece in documenting the marginalised experience.”

Charlene Prempeh, Founder of A Vibe Called Tech

Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi  
“Emezi’s writing practice is so broad in scope and genre that it can be difficult to know what to expect when you pick up one of their books. Dear Senthuran is the best of them: absorbing, ambitious and disturbing.”

Aesop’s Queer Library will run until June 30th at Aesop’s Soho store on 41 Lexington St, W1F 9AJ, with complimentary books available to all visitors while stocks last.