This live event will be held at the Grand Parade Building City Campus University of Brighton,  58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton BN2 0JY Room 202

This event is free but registration via is required  via this link https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/centre-for-transforming-sexuality-and-gender/t-yazjxdk

Redfern Jon Barrett presents their work Proud Pink Sky breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia—presenting an ambitopian vision of the world’s first gay state. A glittering metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, but is there a place for them in the deeply divided city? Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district—not until she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.

Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much we must sacrifice to find identity and community.

Redfern Jon Barrett is author to novels including Proud Pink Sky, a speculative story set in the world’s first LGBTQ+ country (Bywater, 2023) and The Giddy Death of the Gays & the Strange Demise of Straights – which was a finalist for the Bisexual Book Awards and featured in Paste Magazine’s ‘10 Audiobooks to Listen to During Pride Month (and Beyond)’.

Redfern’s essays and short stories have appeared in publications including The Sun, Guernica, Strange Horizons, Passages North, PinkNews, Booth, FFO, ParSec, Orca, and Nature Futures. Their writing has been shortlisted for Scotland’s HISSAC prize, was a semifinalist for the Journal Non/Fiction Collection and Big Moose prizes, received an honourable mention for the Leapfrog Prize, and has exhibited at the National Museum of Denmark.

Born in Sheffield in 1984, Redfern grew up in market towns, seaside resorts, and post-industrial cities before moving to Wales and gaining a PhD in Literature from Swansea University (Prifysgol Abertawe) in 2010. Redfern is nonbinary queer, and has campaigned for LGBTQ+ and polyamory rights since they were a teenager. They currently live in Berlin.

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Click below to see Proud Pink Sky’s: