Two Blake Friedmann authors have been longlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. Kerry Hudson’s THIRST and Laurie Penny’s UNSPEAKABLE THINGS were both among the 13 books selected for the prize which celebrates the best of LGBT literature. Other longlisted nominees include Neel Mukherjee, Anna Freeman and Emily Mackie. The shortlist will be announced on 6 November.

THIRST is a heart-breaking romance of almost unbearable fragility in contemporary East London & Russia. Kerry Hudson is also author of TONY HOGAN BOUGHT ME AN ICE CREAM FLOAT BEFORE HE STOLE MY MA, which was shortlisted for 8 awards, including the Green Carnation, and won the Scottish First Book Award. Both books were published by Chatto.

Laurie Penny’s UNSPEAKABLE THINGS is a fresh look at gender and power in the twenty-first century which asks difficult questions about dissent and desire, money and masculinity, sexual violence, menial work, mental health, queer politics and the Internet. It was published by Bloomsbury earlier this year.

Praise for THIRST:

'Hudson excels at depicting twilight lives... tremendously affecting… impressively unostentatious in its instinct for a common story within a city of millions that rarely gets heard.' - Claire Allfree, The Metro

'Hudson builds up narrative tension slowly. It’s not so much the will-they-won’t-they tension that is more pervasive to general romance, but rather a sense, even before we know Alena’s back-story fully, of external threat lingering in the air, knocking on the door of Dave’s flat, now a refuge... THIRST is hardly an easy summer read but it is probably an essential one.' - The Scotsman

Praise for UNSPEAKABLE THINGS:

‘We need her. … We need fresh, extreme voices to make us re-examine ourselves for complacency and closed-mindedness. Penny forces us to test the ground we stand on and say, yes.’ – Melanie Reid, The Times

‘[Laurie Penny] knits rendingly painful personal anecdotes into the essays in "Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution," … [she] is resolutely urgent (and sometimes very earnest) as she reaches for context, reminding us of the excluded and the undervalued.’ – Joy Press, The LA Times