Comment by purpleflashing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purpleflashing | Hacker News Reader

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2025: Krasznahorkai -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2024: Han Kang -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2023: Jon Fosse -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2022: Annie Ernaux -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah -- there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities

2020: Louise Gluck -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2019: Peter Handke -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

2018: Olga Tokarczuk -- I think her work is the one that fits your description best

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro -- no LGBT themes explicitely AFAIK, but queer readings of his work are a thing

2016: Bob Dylan -- no LGBT themes, characters, or plots

Gurnah is an immigrant (a refugee to be more precise) who can be considered living "in a diaspora" and his work does focus on the topic prominently. Ishiguro is a British citizen who thinks of himself as British, I believe, his parents moved when he was very young IIRC. He didn't visit Japan until his adulthood. I don't think his works are "disapora-adjecent" thematically but I only read two of his novels, so not completely confident here.

The rest write in their native languages and live in their birth countries.

I believe when you mention Carson's LGBT text, you refer to Autobiography of Red, it was written in the late 90s, not this year.

Edit: fixing typos, punctuation, and wording

> there are homoerotic themes in some of his work but the characters are not gay in terms of their identities, and homoeroticism has more to do with the ideas of power rather than sexual identities

Heavily anti-gay cultures (like Nazi and far right) produce surprising amounts of homoerotic art for some reason. I think it goes with certain kind of masculine supremacy - you need to convince boys they are better off with masculine boys only and somehow end up homoerotic as a result. Plus, I guess, once everybody is obviously not gay, people stop clocking those things as what they are.

Edit: not trying to imply that the book is like that, just want to support the point that homoerotic does not imply gay culture.

Tbh, I haven't read/watched much of explicitely far-right art but that sounds reasonable. IIRC nazis (as in NSDAP and whoever made art during that time) heavily focused on the idea of vitality, physicality, health, and the beauty of masculine strength which sounds like it is almost destined to produce homoerotic effect. I mean, if you encourage men to depict beautiful male bodies, you will get depictions from and for men who are really, realy into beautiful male bodies. :D

Carson, Gurnah have heavy LGB themes. Tokarczuk is an LGBT activist with light themes.

Ishiguro, Handke, Kang are known for their ethnic diaspora writings.

I suppose it really depends on how you see light/heavy and what you consider "diaspora writings" or "LGBT themes", whether you refer to text or subtext. For example, Han Kang writes a lot about alienation which is a thing that people in diasporas do experience but people experience it in many other contexts. When looking at her texts on the surface, most of her books are set in Korea and are about very Korean things, e.g. Jeju Massacre, Gwangju Uprising, etc.

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