Non Fiction
Category: Memoir, Non Fiction, Travel
Number of pages: 370
ISBN: 9781781727775
Publication date: March 25, 2024
Price: £14.99
“Gwyn’s latest book is a fascinating and multilayered enterprise. It intersperses the personal with the literary, the political with the social, and takes the reader through multiple landscapes and discoveries.” – Leo Boix, Morning Star
In Ambassador of Nowhere, Richard Gwyn charts his journey across South America in search of poems for his landmark anthology, The Other Tiger. Criss-crossing the continent, he is driven through lunar landscapes in Patagonia, walks in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile, and travels to a town on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. From the betrayal of revolution in Nicaragua to the victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and the threat of narco gang violence in Mexico, Gwyn’s lyrical, life-affirming account pays homage to a deeply conflicted and paradoxical continent.
Ambassador of Nowhere is also a book about translation, and the multiple representations of reality that the act of translation sets in motion, even as the author struggles to keep his own life on track when confronted by the demons of an earlier existence.
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.
“Gwyn’s prose is lyrical without being indulgent… evocative and poignant… Ambassador of Nowhere embraces rather than laments this sense of ongoingness, treating life itself as the ultimate poem to be translated…”
Josh Weeks, Times Literary Supplement
“Gwyn’s latest book is a fascinating and multilayered enterprise. It intersperses the personal with the literary, the political with the social, and takes the reader through multiple landscapes and discoveries.”
Leo Boix, Morning Star
“A series of informative, revealing and meditative journals – with poetry set very much at the heart – they remind us how Gwyn is one of the most companionable of writers and most perceptive of cultural guides.”
Jon Gower
“A wonderfully rich and immersive tour through the lands and literatures of Latin America… Gwyn explores translation and alcoholism, history, mortality and Welsh identity with the same acute and generous eye.”
Tom Bullough
“Richard Gwyn is a keen explorer of Latin American maps, as attentive to small anecdotes as he is to the larger conflicts that define a society… To accompany this empathetic traveller, tragicomic chronicler and passionate scholar of an entire continent is a rare pleasure…”
Andrés Neuman
‘Richard Gwyn journeys through the literature and landscapes of Latin America with the attentive gaze of someone on the lookout for the unexpected, and the conspiratorial air of one who makes close friends of perfect strangers… The paradox of this solitary adventure is that its author becomes the best of travelling companions.’
Juan Villoro
‘A beautiful book. Richard Gwyn writes with a poet’s senses — the keen eye, the impeccable ear — but in his travels he is a translator, and not only of great poems, but also of whole cultures and worldviews. His vision of Latin America is generous, clear-eyed and wise.’
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
