Wright to Writer: Katrina Naomi questions Nathan Evans about Homography

Katrina Naomi questions Nathan Evans about Homography

Katrina Naomi

'Preaching to the choir is important: I hope gay boys read Homography and feel seen, in a way I never felt seen, growing up in Kentish wastelands.'

Katrina Naomi: Tell us something about the title?

Nathan Evans: I had wanted to call the collection Bold, which is Polari for homosexual, but Justin said, ‘no, that’s the name of our Queer Poetry Soirée,’ so I went away and came up with Queerography, but Justin said, ‘no, you can’t have another book with queer in the title,’ so I went away again, came back with Homography, and Justin said, ‘okay.’ I thought I was being all clever and creating a new portmanteau of homosexual and biography, but it turns out homography is a thing, well, two things: in geometry, it is the mapping of multiple perspectives of a single subject; in the dictionary, it’s two words with the same form but different meanings—like gay. And that seemed to fit, so I settled for it.

KN: Why poetry?

NE: Good question, and one I ask myself frequently: why do I write poetry and not something sensible-slash-commercial like romantasy? But then, I don’t choose the poems, the poems choose me: they alight, unexpectedly, as a butterfly on a drab winter’s day, and they’re so very pretty I simply cannot bear to brush them away. Then I spend hours and days and weeks chasing until I pin them down.

KN: Cocktails or tea?

NE: Well, I do love an espresso martini, but if we’re going binary, I’ll have to take tea. I mix my own blends: lapsang souchong with rose petal, earl grey with home-harvested marigold; I’m also fond of a gustatory portmanteau.

KN: You've a background in theatre/performance, how does this influence how you write?

NE: I would say it’s left me with a capacity for ‘funny voices’: the instinct to entertain never really goes away, and my poems often use humour to sugar something deeper, darker; sometimes I write in ‘character’, as I like to explore perspectives that are not exactly my own.

KN: What book stays with you from your childhood? 

NE: I was in Margate, recently—not quite a Madonna-ordained ‘heaven’ but far from the hellish place of our childhoods. They have a lovely bookshop; I was looking for something for my niece’s birthday and the lovely bookseller, seeing me nonplussed by garish covers said, ‘Well, there’s always Charlotte’s Web.’ It was the first time I’d thought about that book in more decades than I care to confess, but the feeling was still there, complex—citrus balancing sweetness, sadness counterpointing beauty. And that’s what I’m chasing in my poetry.

KN: If you could travel anywhere, without damaging the environment, where would you go?

NE: To paraphrase Hirsch/Miller (as sung by Charlene, the comeback queen): ‘I spent my life exploring / the subtle whoring / that costs too much to be free / hey [boy] I've been to paradise, but I've never been to me...’ I have been to me, on occasion, it’s a destination that’s been some time coming; as for the environmental damages, I couldn’t say.

KN: Is it important that Homography speaks to a straight as well as queer/gay audience? If so, why/why not?

NE: Preaching to the choir is important: I hope gay boys read Homography and feel seen, in a way I never felt seen, growing up in Kentish wastelands. It’s also important to throw church doors open so the world can hear the (sadness and) beauty of our song; that’s how we get change. I think this is why my editor, Joelle Taylor, encouraged me to add an introduction and notes as bookends—so everyone has keys to the collection.

KN: Tell us a bit about class in your writing?

NE: In one poem in the collection, I write, ‘My childhood was happily unhungry: I hadn’t yet / appetite for what I didn’t know I lacked.’ Later in the same poem: ‘I lost my virginity in an Oxford dormitory to an old / Etonian who became my first boyfriend. The manifold / distance between me and my family grew exponentially / as he taught me to speak properly, what to see.’ Class wasn’t something to which my eyes were open, before university; after, it wasn’t something I could unsee. One of the writers in my prose group recently fed back that all my characters are obsessed by class. Plus ça change. But I’m pleased to report that the distance between me and my family has not kept growing. Some things can change.

KN: Three favourite songs/pieces of music?

NE: The poem I mentioned uses the form of Desert Island Discs, so I’m going to select three of its tracks: ‘Rebel Rebel’, David Bowie (‘My first song was conceived the same year as me / though I didn’t listen to it until touching twenty.’); ‘Third Sea Interlude from Peter Grimes’, Benjamin Britten (‘I’ve chosen / this section as I can imagine listening to its evocation / of moonlight as I sit on my beach at night, reflecting / on reflections, waxing and waving.’); ‘Rite of Spring’, Igor Stravinsky (I wouldn’t normally do this, as Pet Shop Boys sing / but when I’m cast away and no one is looking, I’ll whisk / all my clothes off and prance about to this.’)

KN: What would you like to have been asked about? Go on, be honest ; )

NE: I would like to have been asked to dance ; )

Katrina Naomi’s pamphlet dance as if (2025) is published by VERVE, her collections Battery Rocks, Wild Persistence and What the Crocodile Taught are published by Seren.

Nathan Evans lives and works in London. His short fiction has been anthologized by Muswell Press (Queer Life, Queer Love) and published in Queerlings magazine. His poetry has been published by Fourteen Poems, Broken Sleep, Dead Ink, Impossible Archetype, Manchester Metropolitan University and Royal Society of Literature. His collection Threads was long-listed for the Polari First Book Prize, his second collection CNUT is published by Inkandescent. He was long-listed for the 2020 Live Canon Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Carlo Annoni Prize 2020 for his play SwanSong. His work in theatre and film has been funded by Arts Council England, toured with the British Council, archived in the British Film Institute, broadcast on Channel 4 and presented at venues including Royal Festival Hall and Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

Katrina’s fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) won the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, the Holyer an Gof award for Poetry, and was recommended in The Guardian. Her previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, the latter jointly with Helen Mort. She is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize and has twice been highly commended in the Forward Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, The Verb, Open Country and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. In September 2025, Katrina published the pamphlet dance as if with Verve, following a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Kyra Norman. Before poetry, Katrina worked as an activist and commissioning editor for an international human rights organisation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths and tutors for Arvon and the Poetry School. Katrina lives in Cornwall & is just back from a residency & readings in Norway  www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

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