BIO

Dr Diarmuid Hester is a cultural historian, activist, and author. Originally from County Kilkenny, Ireland, he holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Sussex and has been a research fellow at New York University, the Library of Congress, the University of Oxford, the British Library, and the University of Cambridge where he was a Leverhulme Fellow until 2021. He teaches at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and is a research associate of Emmanuel College.

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Diarmuid has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and n+1 among other venues. Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, the definitive account of a writer once called ‘the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction’, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2020. Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories, an exploration of literature, art, and a queer sense of place, was published by Allen Lane/Penguin (UK) in 2023 and Pegasus Press (US) in 2024.

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A confident and experienced public speaker, Diarmuid has appeared on podcasts, radio, and TV, at summer festivals like Wilderness and Irregular Folk, and at the Hay Festival. He is the creator of Prick Up Your Ears, immersive podcasts and audio trails that uncover the little-known histories of familiar places. He is also the co-founder of Club Urania, a monthly performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and allies developed in partnership with Cambridge Junction and Wysing Arts Centre. In 2020, Diarmuid was named a BBC New Generation Thinker, and he regularly contributes to BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.

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Diarmuid is passionate about the capacity of cultural history to bring about radical change, by uncovering marginalised stories; by connecting details that have previously been kept apart; by creating counter-narratives that imagine the past differently and shift our perceptions of what's possible in the present.