McMillan and Chan are both acclaimed poets themselves – McMillan has won the Guardian first book award, the Somerset Maugham award and the Polari prize for his work, while Chan’s debut collection Flèche won the 2019 Costa poetry award.
They added: “It will be interesting to see what poets today capture of this moment and how things shift in 10 or 20 years.” Jay Bernard, whose first poetry collection Surge was based on the New Cross fire archives and won the Ted Hughes award, said 100 Queer Poems was “coming at a critical, contradictory juncture: widespread hatred and distrust of trans people alongside huge efforts at representation and inclusion general acceptance of cis gay and bisexual people yet rising intolerance post-Brexit an increasingly vocal and visible intersex population, yet few legal rights or protections for them”.
