Swansea-based author Roshi Fernando has been longlisted for a prestigious short story prize alongside the likes of Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel, Tibor Fischer and Susan Hill.
Roshi, whose work was first anthologised by Seren, is in contention for the 2011 Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award, which is worth £30,000 to the winner.
Roshi has been nominated for her story ‘The Fluorescent Jacket’, part of her first Homesick which won the Inpress Prize for New Writers in 2009 and was published by Inpress last year. The novel is a composite of seventeen interwoven short stories about a sommunity of Sri Lankan immigrants carving out new lives in a hostile Britain.
“Three Cuts”, her bloody retelling of the Cinderella story, was published last October in Seren anthology myth and horror stories Sing Sorrow Sorrow, edited by Gwen Davies.
Roshi, born in London 1966, is currently finishing a PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University.
“The Flurescent Jacket” is one of twenty stories longlisted for the prize. for which the judges include Melvyn Bragg and AS Byatt. The shortlist will be announced on March 13, with the winner announced at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on April 8.

Nick Lambert, editor of the eagerly awaited Llandaff Cathedral, gave an interview on Wales this Week-Blitz. As Wales remember seventy years ago this week, Swansea became the first place outside London to suffer three consecutive night of bombing. Raids followed at Cardiff, Pembroke Dock and many other Welsh towns.
The new title Llandaff Cathedral, described as ‘Lavishly illustrated’, includes the story of resurrection from extensive bomb damage during the Second War and the controversial majestas by Epstein that made the cathedral national news in the sixties. Accessibly written for the lay reader, the book is heavily illustrated with line drawings, plans, and archive and contemporary photographs. The research for the book has brought to light fascinating, never before seen images from the cathedral archive and elsewhere.
Click here for Nick’s interview (13:04 minutes)
 

Martin Shipton will launch his brand new title Poor Man’s Parliament at the Senedd (National Assembly building).
2011 is perhaps the most crucial year in the history of the National Assembly for Wales since the referendum to establish it in 1997 and the first elections in 1999. The timely publication of Poor Man’s Parliament provides through its record of the first ten years of the Assembly’s life and the issues that surface during that time. For author Martin Shipton, Chief Reporter at the Western Mail and a pro-devolutionist, the limited law-making powers and procedures of the original devolution settlement have been central. How could the Assembly work within these limitations? What tensions would result in between Cardiff and Westminster? Were all the political parties committed even to the powers available? Was democracy and government in Wales held back?
Shipton’s analysis is an eye-opening and informative exploration of what has been achieved and what might have been. And woven into the narrative of issues and government is a second, telling narrative of political machination and drama. The Assembly has had its fair share of eye-catching drama: the Alun Michael/Rhodri Morgan leadership election, the Mike German credit card incident, Ron Davies’s and Rod Richard’s private lives spilling into politics, the ongoing tensions at the top of Plaid Cymru, shock election results, Peter Law’s defection from Labour. And behind the scenes a reverse of Tory attitudes towards devolution, obstructiveness within the Labour Party in Wales and a Parliament in Westminster that either failed to understand Welsh devolution or tired to hang on to its powers despite the political settlement.
Those who think that nothing happens at the Assembly will read Poor Man’s Parliament and wonder how they could be so wrong.
Wednesday 16th Feb 6pm – Media Briefing Room, Senedd. Please email [email protected] for an invite.

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When Simon Hicks sent on to me an email from Karen McDowell in New Zealand I was intrigued. This is what Karen had written: “I wonder if you could pass on my address to Anne Cluysenaar. I believe my mother (Muriel Paxton) was her first children’s nurse in Belgium. I have a reference from Sybil Cluysenaar dated May 1938, 93 Groeselenberg, Uccle, Belgium.” As I was indeed born at that address in 1936 I emailed Karen. She sent a bunch of photos in reply. “Well the Internet is an amazing tool!”, she wrote, “ I have carried these bits and pieces around with me for years always thinking I must find out about these Cluysenaars! I have a few memories of mother talking about you and your family but of course as a child I didn’t listen properly! You probably won’t remember her – she was with you from January ’37 to May ’38.” It suddenly came to me that her mother Muriel Paxton might well be the nurse my mother had greatly admired and often in later years referred to as ‘Packy’. ‘Packy’ = Paxton? In subsequent exchanges we agreed this was likely. But why would my mother would have used a nick-name? I feel sure she must have known Muriel from the time when she herself trained in London as a nurse, but the details remain a mystery to both Karen and myself. And of course, Karen is right, I don’t remember her mother, and I’m struck by how the past may suddenly re-emerge, yet fail to re-emerge fully! and also by the thought that there must be images hidden in our brains to which we no longer have access. Most of the photos Karen sent were familiar from my own photo albums, but there was one I had never seen before – me, as a toddler, stepping out of a doorway:

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Did I never see this because it was taken with ‘Packy’s camera and kept by her?
 
Well, I am writing some diary-poems and this was my entry for January 5, addressed to Karen and trying to return some existence at least to the moment in the picture, a moment significant for us both:
 
She stands in a doorway, right knee raised
as if to step over an obstacle, up
an invisible stair…forward, anyway.
It must be Packy she’s looking at.
 
‘Packy’? A nick-name I still hear
in my mother’s voice, though I can’t see
what I saw then, as the nurse so admired
by my mother took this of the baby girl.
 
I wish I could pass to you, Karen, what must
still exist in my brain – your mother-to-be
a few feet away, crouching to catch
that moment of life, lost and forgotten.
 
Over seventy years since she straightened up
and I must have taken that step, but just now
the baby, me, grown up more or less,
at least takes this other, to meet you – her future.
 
 

Seren’s poetry reading series ‘First Thursday’ is back.
Join us at Chapter Arts Centre this Thursday, 3rd Feb for a ‘Poetry Wales Special’. Winner of the Poetry Wales ‘Purple Moose’ Competition Graham Clifford, is reading from his recently published pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country. Poetry Wales editor and author Zoë Skoulding will also be reading along side Graham.
Thursday Feb 3rd, 7.30pm, £2 Media Point Room, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
Peter Finch will be reading at Chapter Arts Centre, March 3rd – click here