Isabel Waidner

Isabel Waidner (born 14 February 1974) is a German-British novelist and academic based in London, England.

Early life Waidner was born in the Black Forest region of Germany. They moved to East London in 1995 to be part of London's queer culture and community. After arriving in London, they worked at various minimum-wage jobs until they were awarded a scholarship for a PhD at the University of Roehampton in 2013. After receiving their doctorate, titled "Experimental fiction, transliteracy, and 'Gaudy Bauble': towards a queer avant-garde poetics", they taught creative writing at the University of Roehampton.

Waidner is nonbinary.

Career Waidner has written five novels: As If (2026, Hamish Hamilton), Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023, Hamish Hamilton), Sterling Karat Gold (2021, Peninsula Press), We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019, Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and Gaudy Bauble (2017, Dostoyevsky Wannabe). We are Made of Diamond Stuff was nominated for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and Sterling Karat Gold won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. They are also the editor of the anthology Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018, Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and have written for numerous publications including Granta, Frieze, the Cambridge Literary Review, and AQNB.

Along with artist Richard Porter, Waidner is the co-founder of the Queers Read This, an event series hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). They were the host and curator of the ICA's literary talk series, This Isn't a Dream, which was live-streamed fortnightly via Instagram Live between January and May 2021.

The German translation of Gaudy Bauble, translated by Ann Cotten, won the Internationaler Literaturpreis. Their first, second and third novels were shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, in 2018, 2020 and 2022 respectively. Spurred by the Brexit referendum, they applied for British citizenship and became eligible for the Goldsmiths Prize. Waidner has written extensively about working-class queer and transgender people, nationalism, and how "the British novel tends to reproduce white, middle-class values and aesthetics", with their work standing in opposition to these motifs.

Between 2002 and 2004, Waidner performed as part of the indie band Klang, releasing records through the UK labels Rough Trade Records and Blast First.