Lejla Cato
Sweden
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Lejla Cato (b. 1997) is active as a poet, literary critic, and editor, and works with the literary scene MALMÖTXT. Her texts have been published in Lyrikvännen, Pralin, and Astra, among others.

– Recently, during a conversation about queer love poetry at the Gothenburg Poetry Festival, I started to cry. The reason I cried was that Petra Mölstad, Nioosha Shams, Mickaela Persson, and Azadé Azad – as well as the audience – were so wise, warm, funny, and above all, brilliant poets and intellectuals. They touched on the question of what queer poetry, and by extension literature, is which, to me, feels as difficult to answer as, say, what love is. Even if one perhaps can’t truly know, I do know at least that queer literature exists and will continue to exist because we and the world deserve it, because we and the world demand that it exist, no matter how much the self-destructive politics of hatred might, bluntly put, wish to destroy its own beauty.

Photo: Amanda Edwall.

Mikko Kauppila
Finland
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Mikko Kauppila is a Finnish actor and writer based in Helsinki. He has worked widely in theatre, TV and film. In 2024 he published his debut fiction novel Terveisin K (Teos), which deals with a young man’s experience with an eating disorder, the experience of gendered body, and their connection to language and writing. The book was nominated for the Helsingin Sanomat Debut Book Prize and the Tulenkantaja Prize.

– The question of queer literature interests me especially in terms of literary forms. If we understand queer as a means of shaking prevailing norms, I think we should extend it to cover also the normative ways of writing and reading.

Photo: Veikko Kähköne

Rana Issa
Norway
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Rana Issa is a writer, translator, and artistic director of Masahat, an association for Arab art and culture in exile in Oslo. She holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Oslo, with a dissertation on Arabic Bible translations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Issa has published widely in English and Arabic, and Tung tids tale is her first book in Norwegian.

– As a queer writer, I have written both explicitly queer literature and other texts that do not necessarily address a queer audience. When I write queer literature, I am often driven by the underlying mindset of being queer – a shared identity that embraces difference and is inclusive despite diversity. Queer politics challenge democracy to be grounded in difference rather than sameness. In literary form, this means creating space for voices that are rarely heard, and centering them. It also means that I do not take gender and identity for granted when creating characters. Instead, I listen closely to how they are shaped by the gender roles they live with, and how they navigate societal expectations and pressures.

– Writing from a queer standpoint is crucial for reshaping our understanding of democracy. It opens up the political imagination toward a more just and inclusive world – a world we can first create through literature, and one that will shape the future.

– Being among other queer writers and cultural practitioners is one of the most rewarding experiences I know. Here, I encounter a shared understanding of how important our voices are to society, and the conversation is freed from the need to convince a normative world of our value. I look forward to exploring queerness in my own writing and bringing it into other themes and political issues that, in my view, can only be truly understood through a queer perspective.