Jay Bernard is a writer, film programmer and archivist from London. As well as working on BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQ film festival, they work at Statewatch, a state research library, archive and collection based at Mayday Rooms. Jay’s first collection Surge (Chatto and Windus, 2019), based on the New Cross Fire archives, won the Ted Hughes Award 2017, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the New Cross Fire in 1981.  Surge is published by New Beacon Books, specialists in African and Caribbean Literature since 1966, and the George Padmore Institute, an archive, educational resource and research centre housing materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in Britain and continental Europe.  Jay’s other works include several pamphlets: The Red and Yellow Nothing (2016), English Breakfast (2013) and Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2008). Their work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in the archive. Jay’s short film ‘Something Said’ has screened in the UK and internationally, including for Aesthetica and Leeds International Film Festival (where it won best experimental and best queer short respectively), Sheffield DocFest and Cinema Africa. Jay is a programmer at BFI Flare, an archivist at Mayday Rooms and resident artist at Raven Row.