Richard Gwyn

Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics, but dropped out after two years and after a brief career as a punk poet spent the decade of the 1980s travelling around the Mediterranean, working on fishing boats and as a waiter in Greece, and as an agricultural labourer in France and Spain. Following several years of alcoholic vagabondage he fell seriously ill in Barcelona. His account of these years appears in The Vagabond’s Breakfast (which won Wales Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2012). Gwyn started out as a poet, and has published four collections, most recently Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure (2018), and is editor of an anthology of work by Welsh poets, The Pterodactyl’s Wing (2003). His first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2005), set in Barcelona, was translated into many languages and brought him international recognition. His other novels include Deep Hanging Out (2007)) and, most recently, The Blue Tent (2019), which appeared in French translation as Les Invités (Gallimard 2022). He is a translator from Spanish, specialising in poetry and short fiction. Between 2011 and 2016 he travelled widely in South America, which resulted in The Other Tiger, a major anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry (2016). His other translations from Spanish include Impossible Loves by Darío Jaramillo and Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito. For ten years he was Professor of Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University. He is the author of Ricardo Blanco’s Blog, which can be found at richardgwyn.me.