Event registration can be found here including tickets for Workshops and the Networking Event.
The full Programme can be found here.
Paper Speaker bios and full abstracts can be found here.
Workshops and Roundtable information can be found here.
The Crafting Your Queer Fantasy TBR post can be found here.
Our post on How to Join the Discord can be found here.
Please find below our keynote speakers for this year’s GIFCon, the reading list in collaboration with Glasgow’s own Category is Books will be coming soon!
Kirsty Logan
Keynote
Wednesday May 7, 2025 from 15:30 – 16:30 BST
The ABCs of Queer Horror: Appetite, Bodies and Coveting (or Craving?)
Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the story collection No & Other Love Stories and the memoir The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. She is also the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She is currently collaborating on several projects across film, TV, collaborative chapbooks, and performance.
Kirsty Logan’s Keynote will cover her work more generally but primarily focus on two of her texts: Things We Say in the Dark and No and Other Love Stories. Both of these compelling volumes of stories focus on women’s experiences, rendered through Kirsty Logan’s distinctive style—one that shifts between the dark, the emotional, the humorous, the tender, and, at times, the unsettling in familiar and yet “queered” worlds. Other favorites of her work include The Gracekeepers, Now She is Witch, and The Gloaming where she combines fantasy, female desire, myths, history, horror, loss, and mystery in her detailed characters and narratives.
Anna McFarlane
Keynote
Thursday May 8, 2025 from 13:30—14:30 BST
‘Fantasy and Trauma: Imagining a Queer Pregnancy’
Anna McFarlane is a Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research on traumatic pregnancy in fantastika was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she is a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome-Trust funded Future of Human Reproduction project. She is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.
For more information on Dr Anna McFarlane or the topic of her Keynote, we recommend reading her article “Sharing experiences of pregnancy and trauma through science fiction” from 2018 in The British Academy website or The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, the introduction of this collection is available here on Google books. Anna McFarlane is also the author of the excellent Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing through the Mirrorshades: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades for cyberpunk enthusiasts and scholars.
Dr. Alice M. Chapman-Kelly
Keynote
Friday May 9, 2025 from 12:45-13:45 BST
Queer Friendships, Soft Workplaces and the Other Comforts of the Swan Queen Archive – Some Thoughts on Why We Read Fic.
Dr Alice M. Chapman-Kelly is a Teaching Associate at the University of Strathclyde. She has published widely on the relationship between lesbian literary history and femslash fanfiction and is the author of two academic monographs, Decolonising the Conrad (Liverpool UP, 2022) and Fanfiction as Queer Healing: Femslash Authorship and the Swan Queen Ship (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
Dr Alice M. Chapman-Kelly has two books available online and in print. Decolonising the Conrad Canon is a fascinating exploration Joseph Conrad’s work and the relationship between author, anti-colonialism, race, women, “lesbianism”, and cannon available online at JSTOR here. Of particular relevance to her Keynote is her second book, Fanfiction as Queer Healing: Femslash Authorship and the Swan Queen Ship, which can be found with Bloomsbury here. It is a thorough and bewitching examination of Femslash Fiction and the complex relationship between fan and text, with particular attention to themes of sapphic desire, anti-racism, maternity and parenting, and childhood through her analysis of the “Swan Queen” fandom.