Luke Turner

Luke Turner is a British writer, editor and journalist, born in Bradford and based in London. He is a co-founder and editor of the online music and culture publication The Quietus, and the author of the memoirs Out of the Woods and Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939–1945 (2023), both published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Career

The Quietus

Turner co-founded The Quietus in 2008 with the journalist John Doran.

Books

Out of the Woods (2019)

Turner’s first book, Out of the Woods, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in January 2019. The book is a memoir set in and around Epping Forest, framed by the breakdown of a long-term relationship and addressing the author’s bisexuality, his upbringing in a Methodist family, his experiences of child sexual abuse and his relationship with the Christian faith. The paper also covered the book in its autobiography and memoir column, in a review by Rachel Cooke.

Prior to publication, Weidenfeld & Nicolson acquired the book in 2017. The book was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Polari First Book Prize. Turner also appeared on The Tom Robinson Show with Tom Robinson on BBC Radio 6 Music to discuss the book, in a conversation covering sexuality, mental health and forests. The book was also reviewed in Louder Than War, which contrasted it with the conventions of music-industry memoir.

In the London Evening Standard, the reviewer Mark Sanderson took a critical view of the book, characterising its author as a "Methodist in his madness" and questioning the framing of Turner's teenage encounters with older men as abuse.

Writing in the New Statesman, the nature writer Philip Hoare placed the book in what he characterised as a small sub-genre of queer nature writing whose antecedents included Denton Welch and Derek Jarman, and compared its rendering of edgeland woodland to the paintings of George Shaw.

In a 2019 interview with Another Man, Turner described the book as concerned with rejecting binary categories of identity and accepting personal contradictions, rather than as a redemptive nature memoir.

In an interview with Katie Goh for The List, Turner described the book's repetitive structure as a deliberate reflection of the experience of depression, and argued against the romanticised image he termed the "lone tormented man" of conventional nature writing.

Men at War (2023)

Turner’s second book, Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939–1945, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2023.

Reviews appeared in a range of British and regional publications. The National covered the book in 2023. In Buzz magazine, the reviewer described Men at War as taking what they characterised as a novel approach to the legacy of the Second World War by examining both Turner's own interest in the subject and its continuing place in British public life. Writing in the Waltham Forest Echo, David O'Driscoll, who reviewed the paperback edition in 2024, focused on Turner's discussion of masculinity and sexuality during wartime, including the suggestion in the book that the war period, rather than the 1960s, represented a significant change in attitudes to sexual fluidity among British men.

In a review for Louder Than War, Richard Foster placed the book in a literary tradition of British wartime writing concerned with marginal or non-combatant figures, citing works by Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Terence Rattigan and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and described it as an alternative study of British attitudes to those who served in the Second World War.

The book was also reviewed in The Telegraph, whose review focused on the book's accounts of the lives of Second World War servicemen and the place of sex in wartime experience.

Reviewing the book for The Times, the paper covered it under the headline "The secret lives of soldiers", framing it as a reassessment of who the men who served actually were. In a review for i, Alim Kheraj characterised the book as part self-examination and part historical reframing, and argued that it challenged what he described as Britain's flattening of those who lived through the Second World War into archetypal heroes by attending instead to the complexity of their minds and bodies.

Other work

According to the National Centre for Writing, Turner also wrote the pamphlet Tracks, published by Rough Trade Books in 2019, and contributed to the 2018 Victoria and Albert Museum collaboration The Good Purvider (Windswept Baby).

Personal life

Turner was born in Bradford,

Works

Out of the Woods. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019. Tracks. London: Rough Trade Books, 2019 (pamphlet). Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939–1945. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023.