NEVER WAS (Cipher Press, 2023)
"Otherworldly and hyperreal, Never Was is a mind-bending and totally beautiful wrestling match with trans and queer lust, the mineral lives of drug trips and extractive industries, and the mysterious alchemy of the people we're thrown together with, whether in work or family or the undersides of towns. Nobody writes like Gavin. This book is an inimitable gem."
JORDY ROSENBERG, author of Confessions of the Fox
BIO ︎︎︎
H. Gareth Gavin was born in Birmingham in 1984. Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize. Never Was (Cipher Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He also writes short fiction: a short story, ‘Home Death’, was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2019/20. Funny Queer, a hand-sewn limited edition collection of stories, was published by the Aleph Press in 2021. An essay on transmasculinity and femininity, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me,’ takes its title from a Muriel Spark ghost story and is collected in Queer Life, Queer Love (Muswell Press, 2021). He currently teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.
Photo: Lee Baxter (2022)
Novels
Never Was (Cipher Press, 2023)
Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014)
Short Fiction
‘Another Man’, Short Fiction (2022)
Funny Queer (Aleph Press, 2021)
‘Home Death’, longlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize (2019/2020)
‘Some Numbers of Cruelty’, Hotel (2019)
Essays
‘A Self-Made Man?’, in Prototype Anthology 4, ed. Jessica Chandler (London: Prototype Publications, 2022), pp. 99-105
‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, in Queer Life, Queer Love, ed. Golnoosh Nour, Matt Bates, Sarah Beal, Kate Beal (London: Muswell Press, 2021), pp. 79-86
‘The Difference Between Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes’, in Necessary Amendments, ed. Stuart Whipps (Milton Keynes: MK Gallery, 2019)
‘Teletexual: ‘This’ is Television’, in This Is Television, ed. Judy Radul (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), pp. 123-136
‘A Word Without A World’, in The Architectural Review 1457: The Book Issue (2018/19), pp. 50-53
‘The Image Has Now Started’, in The Jump Room, ed. Richard Whitby (London: The Old Waterworks Publishing, 2018)