Simon Edge

Simon Edge (born 25 December 1964 in Chester) is a British novelist and journalist. He was editor of Capital Gay and subsequently wrote for the gay magazine Attitude. He was married to Ezio Alessandroni, a former Roman Catholic priest, until the latter’s death from cancer in March 2017.

Career

Edge was the final editor of Capital Gay, the pioneering lesbian and gay newspaper published in London between 1981 and 1995, and was later a senior contributing editor at Attitude. He was also involved in the launch of Positive Nation, the magazine produced by the UK Coalition of People Living with HIV and AIDS.

He is the author of six novels including The Hurtle of Hell (Lightning Books, 2018), a satire on the attitude of religion to homosexuality. Novelist Michael Arditti called it ‘an ingenious take on It’s A Wonderful Life’.</ref>

His fifth novel, The End of the World is Flat (Lightning Books, 2021), uses flat earth belief as an allegory for contemporary ideological debates; it was described by Matthew Parris in The Times as “a satire of Swiftian ferocity, a thinly veiled parody of a prevailing madness of the hour”.

His novel In the Beginning (Lightning Books, 2023) is a fictionalised satirical account of the Forstater v CGD Europe employment tribunal, in which a tax expert’s contract was not renewed after she posted gender-critical comments on social media.

Edge appears in Adult Human Female (2022), a documentary presenting gender-critical perspectives on debates around sex and gender recognition, in which he discusses the influence of Stonewall’s policies on institutional adoption of trans-inclusive practices.