Non Fiction
Category: Essays, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 188
ISBN: 9781854114013
Publication date: October 28, 2005
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Winner of Wales Book of the Year Award 2006.
“On the strength of this book alone, Minhinnick stakes his claim to be regarded as the finest writer working in any genre in Wales today.” Jim Perrin, The Guardian
Join Robert Minhinnick on a journey across a radioactive planet. Researching the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons, the writer follows a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Here, he is led into the temples of a deserted Babylon and to what his guides insist is the site of the Tower of Babel.
Interspersed with these ‘radioactive writings’, which seem part documentary, part dream, are essays on a host of different places. Minhinnick pursues Dante through Florence, and searches for a poem given to him by a murdered schoolgirl in south Wales.
Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, New York, Italy, England, Finland, Canada: this globalised world is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, filled with the background noise of contemporary society yet capable of providing places and moments of utter silence. Jetlagged, culture-lagged, Minhinnick returns to his native Wales, its coastline and valleys as extraordinary as anything encountered in a Babel that might be myth or alarmingly real.
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).
