Non Fiction
Category: Essays, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 139
ISBN: 9781854110756
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £8.99
Wales Book of the Year Winner, 1993
From Copacabana to urban Yorkshire, from New Mexico to a Welsh funfair, from The Netherlands to the Clare coast, Robert Minhinnick’s world is a shrinking one. Its cast of characters includes Rio beach beggars, Madison Avenue literati, saloon-bar poolsters and millionaire scrap merchants. These essays cover a variety of subjects: third world poverty and the internationalism of alcohol, rugby through the eyes of a vegetarian, nuclear power, sunbathing and a thanksgiving dinner for the demise of Margaret Thatcher. But at the core of this collection is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer’s own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits. Whether in the rainforest or the big match crowd, Minhinnick’s language, acid, imagist, compassionate, celebrates the people he meets and, fleetingly, defines their lives.
Robert Minhinnick
Robert Minhinnick is one of Wales’ (some would say Britain’s) most eminent writers. He is a multi-prizewinning poet, essayist and novelist; his most recent poetry collection was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2017 and won Wales Book of the Year, which he has won three times. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. He edited Poetry Wales for ten years. Minhinnick is also an environmentalist and founder of Friends of the Earth Cymru and Sustainable Wales who has written extensively on the environment.
His debut novel Sea Holly (2007) was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2008. Robert’s second novel Limestone Man (2015) is a gripping story of a man who tries to connect past and present yet is haunted by dreams of Australia and his youth. His novel Nia was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019
He edited Gorwelion: Shared Horizons (2021) a book of essays about climate change. His latest non-fiction book Delirium was published by Seren (2021).
