3rd October, 2013

New Books, Exciting Events

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness sees the Seren list, like Keats’ vines, loaded and blessed with fruit round our thatch-eaves. New poetry titles include Dai George’s first collection, The Claims Office, prize-winning Kathryn Simmonds’ second collection, The Visitations, and Disturbance, a fittingly disturbing novel in verse by Ivy Alvarez. In translation there is In Reality, the selected poems of Jean Portante, a major European voice from Luxembourg.
Just harvested: Peter Finch’s epic walk along both sides of the Bristol Channel, Edging the Estuary, the fictional walk from Wales to London by Ibrahim & Reenie in David Llewellyn’s eponymous novel, and the childhood memoir of mountain-walking (there’s a theme here) Owain Hughes: Everything I Have Always Forgotten, in which his father, the novelist Richard Hughes, looms large. And if you’re a walker yourself, try visiting some of the places in Borderlands, Phil Cope’s lusciously illustrated compendium of holy wells and other watery features of the Welsh Marches.
And we have many events to celebrate our autumn titles. Take the rare opportunity to meet Jean Portante as he reads in Bangor, Aberystwyth and Cardiff. See David Llewellyn in action in Cardiff, or take in an exhibition of Phil Cope’s photographs. Above all, if you’re London-based, make sure you get a ticket for the grand finale of Seren’s retellings of the Mabinogion series – all the authors in one event at Somerset House.
The days may be getting cooler and the night darker but there’s plenty of heat and light in the Seren list.