Kirsty Logan's The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales has won the Polari First Book prize. The annual award selects the 'very best debut books that explore the LGBT experience', and selects an overall winner from a shortlist of five titles. Logan's The Rental Heart... is described by publisher Salt Publishing thus:

Twenty tales of lust and loss. These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world...

Interesting indeed. It's clearly a collection of great imagination, depth and energy, and it's been steadily gaining admirers in the last three years. In 2013 The Rental Heart... won the Scott Prize for short stories, earning it publication with Salt. In 2014 it was a Book of the year for Herald Scotland, and was also shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize.

In winning the Polari First Book award, the title's status is given even greater support, as Logan earns the acknowledgement such a win deserves. Prize chair Paul Burston was positively full of praise for Logan on the awarding of the prize. And had this to say about the author and collection:

“The shortlist for this year’s prize was one of the strongest we’ve ever seen, a great reflection of the breadth and depth of LGBT literature today. However, the judges were enormously impressed with Logan’s command of language and skillful story telling. She writes from a variety of queer perspectives, showing us a range of outsider’s viewpoints.

Her characters are compelling, alienated, and trying to find a place themselves in a world with which they are at odds. For a first book The Rental Heart and Other Fairy Tales is remarkably assured. Each tale feels like a work of art in miniature, a controlled experiment in transformative storytelling."

Quite the commendation!

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Buy The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales now:

Available from Foyles.

Or...support your local independent bookshop through Hive.

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