300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World (Hardback) - Luke Edward Hall

Steeped in honey, Juventius,
your golden eyes, and as sweet too
when I press my lips to them -
three hundred thousand kisses
is not close to enough

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Sean Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life. A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world - and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own - 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.

About the Author

Luke Edward Hall is an English artist, designer and columnist working across multiple disciplines. His philosophy is shaped by a love of storytelling, fantasy and romanticism. He lives in London and Gloucestershire. Sean Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.