Short bio

So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their first collection of short stories Truth and Dare, from Cipher Press, and was long listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Their recent books include A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and their most recent collaborative projects are The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House), an illustrated anthology of writing on Le Guin’s cartographies, Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), The Film We Can’t See (BBC Sounds), Unreal Sex (Cipher Press), and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor. So works with Burley Fisher Books, queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and Outburst Arts in Belfast, as editor of catflap magazine. 🦋 @suchmayer.

Full bio

So Mayer is a writer, bookseller, organiser and film curator, currently based in London, UK. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their first collection of short stories Truth & Dare from Cipher Press was long listed for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. They write poetry, fiction, essays on film and culture, and creative non-fiction, often at the same time and in a single piece: for example, in their short story ‘Dune Elegies’, which was shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Short Story Award 2023. They can be found selling books at Burley Fisher Books (Best Independent Bookstore, London, 2020 and 2021), hosting events in cinemas with queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and writing for Frieze, Criterion, and their newsletter Disturbing Words.

With their collaborators, they have co-hosted the podcasts Hell is For Hyphenates and Burley Fisher’s Isolation Station, and programmed film and literature events including BFDay23, BFDay21, and Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68. So is a co-chair, with Nichola Smalley and Preti Taneja, of English PEN‘s Translation Advocacy Group.

So is the author of A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, a book-length essay on queer films, bodies and fascism for Peninsula Press, and of the poetry chapbook <jacked a kaddish> for Litmus Publishing. Previous publications include (O) (Arc, 2015), Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015), and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009).

Recent collaborative projects include: Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press), the first-ever collection of Le Guin’s writing on feminisms and gender and The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House), an illustrated anthology of writing on Le Guin’s cartographies; The Film We Can’t See, a six-part BBC Sounds podcast about queer films, bodies and censorship; co-editing, with Adam Zmith, Unreal Sex, a queer SFFH erotica anthology for Cipher Press; and co-editing, with Corinn Columpar, Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor.

Recent contributions to anthologies include: ‘ish’ (essay), What the Water Gave Us (Takeaway/Lucy Writers); ‘In Space’ (fiction), Riptide 15;  ‘Carapace’ (poem), Altered States (Ignota); ‘Over’ (poem), On Relationships (3ofCups); ‘Ah! to fleet / Never fleets móre’ (essay), At the Pond (Daunt); ‘The Broken Open’ (introduction), Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota); ‘Palaver’ (poem), Trans Love (JKP).

They have contributed essays to DVDs including: Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt), Days (Tsai Ming-liang),  the selected works of Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma), Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson), Working Girls and Regrouping (on Born in Flames) (Lizzie Borden), The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, Mayak/The Lighthouse (Maria Saakyan), Gaea Girls / Shinjuku Boys (Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams), and to several BFI DVD & Bluray releases, including: Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan), Yentl (Barbra Streisand), Friendship’s Death (Peter Wollen), Varda par Agnès (Agnès Varda), Blue Black Permanent (Margaret Tait), The Gold Diggers / Thriller (Sally Potter), and Riddles of the Sphinx / Penthesilea (Laura Muvley and Peter Wollen).