Roz Kaveney

Roz Kaveney (born 9 July 1949) is a British writer, critic, and poet, best known for her critical works about pop culture and for being a core member of the Midnight Rose collective. Kaveney's works include fiction and non-fiction, poetry, reviewing, and editing. Kaveney is also a civil liberties and transgender rights activist. She has contributed to several newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian. She is also a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship and a former deputy chair of Liberty. She was an editor of the transgender-related magazine META.

Early life and transition Kaveney attended Pembroke College, Oxford, where she participated in a poetry group that had a particular interest in Martian poetry, and shared a flat with Christopher Reid. Kaveney is a transgender woman, who began transition in her last year at Oxford.

In the early 1970s, Kaveney was part of the Gay Liberation Front's Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen Group. Along with several other individuals, including Rachel Pollack, she contributed to the 1972 essay "Don't call me mister, you fucking beast", which has been described as Britain's "first trans manifesto". This was published alongside other works in the second women's issue of Come Together, the newspaper of the Gay Liberation Front.

After being "persuaded to desist by feminist friends", Kaveney delayed her transition for several years. She eventually transitioned around 1978. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, including science fiction and fantasy periodicals such as Vector and Foundation, Kaveney is also known for editing books which contain a range of essays about popular films and television shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica.

Literary career Kaveney's first novel, Tiny Pieces of Skull, was published in 2015 by Team Angelica Press, 27 years after she originally wrote it in the 1980s. An early draft was read by Neil Gaiman, who wrote in 2016 that he "was saddened and horrified that publishers wouldn’t publish it".

In a review for The Times Literary Supplement, Lucy Popescu describes Tiny Pieces of Skull as a work which "deserves to be recognised as a seminal fictional work on transgender identity and transphobia ... hilarious and chilling". It won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.

From 1982-1984 Kaveney was an editor for the British fantasy and science fiction magazine Interzone.

Poetry Kaveney gave up poetry in her twenties, not resuming until reaching 50. Dialectic of the Flesh collects Kaveney's poetry about queerness, trans experience, and the body, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.

In 2018 Sad Press published Catallus, Kaveney's translation and reimagination of the Latin works of Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. Reviewing Catallus for Tears in the Fence, Antony John praises Kaveney's "very rude translations" of Catullus' "very rude poems". In the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Tori Lee argues that Kaveney "upends traditional understanding of what Catullus—in all his aggression, obscenity, and sexuality—represents", and describes the collection as a "light, readable, enormously fun Catullus that will delight classicists and non-classicists alike".

Other work

In 1988, Kaveney made an extended appearance on the television discussion After Dark with among others Andrea Dworkin and Anthony Burgess. Kaveney wrote later:

In 2021 Kaveney appeared in the documentary Rebel Dykes, which explores the history of a radical lesbian subculture in 1980s London, England.

Creative influences Kaveney has cited Marilyn Hacker, Thomas M. Disch, and Samuel R. Delany among her literary influences.