Romancero Books with the support of the Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs of the Spanish Embassy in London, AC/E Programme for the Internalisation of Spanish Culture presents the VI London Festival of Queer Spanish Culture
Poetry reading
Leo Boix, Adriann Ramírez and Peter Scarpello reading Sonnets of Dark Love
Sonnets of Dark Love (Sonetos del amor oscuro)
Sonetos del amor oscuro is a sequence of eleven sonnets written by Federico García Lorca in the final years of his life, generally dated to 1935–1936, shortly before his assassination at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Composed in the classical sonnet form — a deliberate return to traditional Spanish poetic structure after the more experimental, surrealist-inflected work of his earlier career — the sequence stands as one of the most intense and openly homoerotic bodies of love poetry in the Spanish language, expressing desire, jealousy, longing and anguish with a rawness rarely matched in Lorca's other work.
The poems are widely believed to have been inspired by Lorca's relationship with Juan Ramírez de Lucas, a young writer and activist with whom the poet was involved in the months before his death, though scholars have also read them as addressed to a more composite or symbolic beloved. The "dark love" of the title has traditionally been interpreted as a reference to homosexual desire — a love that, in the social and political climate of 1930s Spain, could not be named or lived openly, and was therefore cloaked in secrecy, shadow and suffering. Poems such as "Soneto de la carta" and "El poeta pide a su amor que le escriba" combine the anguish of unrequited or threatened love with an unmistakable eroticism, fusing classical form with a modern, unflinching account of queer desire.
Lorca never authorised the publication of the sonnets during his lifetime, and their transmission history has long been entangled with the broader suppression and sanitising of his homosexuality by Francoist Spain and, for decades afterward, by custodians of his literary legacy. The poems circulated only in fragments and unauthorised versions for years — first partially published in 1983–84, notably in the newspaper ABC, in a version many considered incomplete or altered — before a more definitive text was established in the 1990s. Their fraught publication history has made the Sonetos del amor oscuro not only a landmark of twentieth-century Spanish poetry, but also a symbol of the long struggle to recover and fully acknowledge the queer dimension of Lorca's life and work — a struggle that remains at the heart of how his legacy continues to be read, reclaimed and celebrated today.
Bios
Leo Boix
Leo Boix is a gay, Argentine–British Latinx poet and translator based in the UK. He is the author of two acclaimed English-language collections, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice, and Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), shortlisted for the Forward Prizes and named a book of the year by The Guardian and The Telegraph. He has also published two collections in Spanish, Un lugar propio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017), and is the editor and lead translator of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry. Boix has won the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and a PEN Award, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2026.
Adriann Ramirez
Adriann Ramirez is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across dance, choreography, film and poetry. They host Lavender Language, a long-running podcast featuring conversations with queer artists, and their creative work explores gender, sexuality, queerness and heritage. Their debut poetry collection, Hot Tears Through Velvet Rage (Polari Press, 2021) — a collage of queer love, shame, anger and self-acceptance combining poetry and photography, with a foreword by Paul Kindersley — marked their first venture into published writing after earlier careers in dance and film.
Peter Scalpello
Peter Scalpello is a queer poet and sexual health therapist originally from Glasgow, now based in London. Their work has appeared in Five Dials, fourteen poems, Gutter, harana poetry, Perverse and Under the Radar, among other magazines and anthologies. Their debut collection, Limbic (Cipher Press, 2022), explores chemsex, masculinity, trauma and memory through the lens of queer experience, establishing Scalpello as one of the most fearless voices in contemporary British queer poetry.
Event in English.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase after the talk.
Check the Festival's website to know about our other events:
https://www.romancerobooks-store.co.uk/vi-lfqsc-fcqel-2026