Guest of Honour - Trip Galey
Everything you need to know
His debut novel, A Market of Dreams and Destiny (Titan) was shortlisted for the 2024 Mythopoeic Best Novel Award. A second book in the same universe will be forthcoming from Titan soon. For readers who wish to go along with Trip to the queerest expanses of his imagination, there is the collection, Betwixt the Cracks, and novel, The Fall of the House of Valenziaga. And there are various novellas to be found here and there!
Wearing his smol-publisher hat, Bona Books has produced the anthologies I Want That Twink OBLITERATED! (shortlisted for the 2025 British Fantasy Best Anthology Award) and Wrath Month. Trip also acts as Editor-in-Chief of Fantabulosa!, the UK’s first professional magazine for queer sci-fi and fantasy short fiction.
Interview of Food for Thought
You obviously like baking. What is your favourite dish to make?
Chocolate-chip snickerdoodles! Not only do I like sneaking bits of cookie batter, but they’re also fun to roll, to dredge in cinnamon-sugar, and to flatten pre-baking (potato mashers and meat tenderisers are both good!)
Which type of tea do you like best?
This is a tie between a mint-and-black-pepper blend I’m very fond of, and your standard Yorkshire tea (two sugars, splash of milk)!
Do you comply with British Standard 6008 for making tea, which won the Ig Noble Prize for Literature in 1999?
Sad to say, I do not. I rarely have the luxury of time that 6008 standard requires!
Which dish in SF&F would you like to try?
The sentimental answer is Lembas (which my younger self always imagined as a slightly sweeter and crumblier shortbread). The gamer in me says one of the fruits that grants immortality and eternal youth.
How does your interest in baking and teas influence your fantasy writing?
I think it helps remind me to weave more sensory detail into the things I write, and to find less-expected descriptive words. It also helps remind me about the importance of food in terms of culture and worldbuilding. But mostly, the tea keeps me going long after I would normally run out of capacity for wordage.
For fun, if you could bake an impossible dish, what would it be?
I’d go full fey culinary madness, and use ingredients like the flavour of the night sky right before dawn’s breaking or the taste of the first flushes of a crush. Not sure what I’d make, but it would be EXTRA