Biography
Kestral Gaian (they/them) is an author, poet, playwright, activist, and professional overthinker. They work across fiction, poetry, theatre, audio, music, and video games. This is either impressive range, or still not knowing what they want to be when they grow up.
Their books include The Boy From Elsewhere, the first novel in the Reality Quake saga, and acclaimed poetry collection Tubelines. Across their work, Kestral returns to queer lives, memory, grief, community, and systems that have forgotten the people they are supposed to serve. Their characters tend to notice the machinery behind ordinary life and decide, usually at considerable inconvenience to themselves, to interfere with it.
Kestral grew up on a council estate with very few people like them reflected in books or on television. Storytelling became a way to find missing possibilities and create their own role models, which sounds far better than calling them imaginary friends. Their work combines imagination, emotional honesty, and political bite, with a strong thread of kindness being more interesting than cruelty. They like jokes in serious places, tenderness that has earned its place, and stories in which survival means more than reaching the final page.