About the Book
A unique anthology bringing together stories of queer life from international playwrights, these seven plays showcase the dazzling multiplicity of queer narratives across the globe: the absurd, the challenging, and the joyful.
From the legacy of colonialism in India to the farcical bureaucracy of marriage law in Kosovo; from a school counsellor in Taiwan coming out as HIV+, to coming of age in an Israel-Palestine coexistence camp, this is a genre-spanning collection of global writing. Contempt by Danish Sheikh (India)
55 Shades of Gay by Jeton Neziraj, translated by Alexandra Channer (Kosovo)
No Matter Where I Go by Amahl Khouri (Jordan)
Only the End of the World by Jean-Luc Lagarce, translated by Lucie Tiberghien (France)
Taste of Love by Zhan Jie, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Taiwan)
Peace Camp Org by Mariam Bazeed (Egypt)
Winter Animals by Santiago Loza, translated by Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevitch (Argentina) Originally selected and performed as part of the Arcola Queer Collective's Global Queer Plays call-out event.
About the Author:
Danish Sheikh worked as a human rights lawyer for six years before transferring to the Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, as Assistant Professor. He teaches courses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, literature and theatre. His first book, Invisible Libraries, was shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Award, 2017. In 2015, he began the Bardolators, a group that performs contemporary versions of Shakespeare plays in public spaces in India. Contempt, his first original script, was longlisted for the Hindu Playwright Award in 2017.
Jeton Neziraj is a playwright from Kosovo. He has written over twenty plays that have been staged and performed widely in Europe as well as in the USA. His plays and his writing have been translated and published in more than fifteen languages. The German theatre magazine Theater der Zeit and the German radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur have described him as 'Kafka of the Balkans.' His work has been awarded with several important local and international prizes and awards. He is also the Director of Qendra Multimedia, an independent cultural company focused on contemporary drama and theatre.
Amahl Khouri is a Jordanian documentary playwright and theatre-maker based in Munich. Khouri is the author of three plays, including No Matter Where I Go (Beirut, 2014) and She He Me (staged reading at the Münchner Kammerspiele in December 2016). Khouri was a selected playwright at the Lark hotINK international play reading series, as well as the recipient of the Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship from PEN USA and a member of the Lincoln Center Director's Lab in 2013.
Jean-Luc Lagarce was a French actor, theatre director and playwright. He was a co-founder of the Théâtre de La Roulotte in 1978, directing productions of playwrights such as Pierre de Marivaux, Eugène Marin Labiche and Eugène Ionesco before beginning to stage his own plays. His plays were published by Théâtre Ouvert and recorded as radio dramas.
Zhan Jie is a screenwriter and playwright based in Taiwan. He received support from the Asian Cultural Council 2018 fellowship program to participate in the New York artist-in-residence program for cultural exchange and artistic experimentation. He has published two e-books, Self Re-Quests and Touching My Mind. His theatre works include Self Re-Quests, Homeless, Women in the Rain, Touching My Mind, Borrowed Family, The Unbearable Rain, White Storyteller, and Homecoming. He has had several TV shows produced, including Boys Can Fly, Spring Beauty, Baby Daddy, House of Toy Bricks, Close Your Eyes Before it's Dark, A Boy Named Flora A, and Bardo, the first Netflix Asia original show.
Mariam Bazeed is a non-binary Egyptian immigrant based in Brooklyn, NY. They graduated with an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in 2018. In addition to being an alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and personal essays, Mariam is a performance artist and singer. They are a fellow at the Center for Fiction, and a past fellow of the Asian American Writers Workshop, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU, and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Their work has been supported by residencies from Hedgebrook, the Marble House Project, and the Millay Colony. Peace Camp Org, Mariam's first play, has been presented at La Mama Theater, NYC (2017), the Arcola Theatre, London (2018), and The Wild Project, NYC (2018). To procrastinate against facing the blank page, Mariam runs a monthly world-music salon, and is a slow student of Arabic music.
Santiago Loza is a film director, writer and playwright from Córdoba, Argentina. His films have been shown at numerous international festivals, and have won awards including the Tiger Award for Best Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Special Jury Prize and Best Director prize at BAFICI, and The Lips (2010), co-directed with Iván Fund, was selected for the Festival de Cannes (Un Certain Regard Award for Best Performance to the three actresses). His plays have toured both independent and commercial venues in Buenos Aires and the rest of the country, and have been nominated for awards such as ACE, Teatros del Mundo, Florencio Sanchez and María Guerrero.
