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Maggie Harris, poet and author of short story collection Writing on Water, has won third prize in the International Welsh Poetry Competition for her poem, ‘On watching a lemon sail the sea’.
See the full list of winners and commended poems on the Welsh Poetry Competition Website, and read Maggie’s prize-winning poem.
 
 
 

Enter our giveaway to win a copy of Black Shiver Moss, Graham Mort’s masterly tenth collection of poetry.
To enter, simply sign up to the Seren newsletter before 1st September:https://www.serenbooks.com/newsletter/signup
 
About Black Shiver Moss:Graham Mort writes beautifully about North Yorkshire, but in Black Shiver Moss new places are made familiar by Mort’s vivid descriptions and evocations: landscapes and peoples as distant as South Africa and as close as Europe. Here is a poet of deep feeling who eschews sentimentality for shrewd observation. His muscular language has a Heaney-esque deftness, yet reaches beyond the physical to register the frailty and brevity of human existence. Mort moves us beyond the visible, towards spiritual and philosophical concerns. What really impresses is the darkly magnificent tone sustained throughout: reminiscent of Beethoven’s late quartets, of Shakespeare’s tragedies, of classical landscape painting, a tone suffused with seriousness and mortality.
 
The winner of this giveaway will be chosen at random from all our email subscribers on 1st September 2017, so make sure you sign up to Seren News before this deadline to be in with a chance of winning.
Feeling generous? Why not invite your friends to enter, by signing up using the link below:http://serenbooks.com/newsletter/signup
 
 

Each month we are shining the spotlight on one outstanding author in celebration of Wales’ year of legends, and for August, this is the prize-winning author of poetry, essays and fiction, Robert Minhinnick.
Minhinnick is the co-founder of the environmental organisation Sustainable Wales, and was formerly the editor of Poetry Wales. He has written for television, provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet, and published a number of books – short stories, poetry, novels, and essays – with us here at Seren. And as part of our celebrations, all these books are 30% off until the end of the month.
Limestone ManRRP £9.99NOW £6.99Minhinnick’s latest novel is a meditation on age and opportunity, and introduces us to Richard Parry: a painter who cannot paint, a writer who doesn’t write. Parry’s obsession is Lulu, that ‘orphan off the street’, his aboriginal  ‘green child’. But on returning from Australia to his hometown he finds it has become notorious for the suicides of young people. As Parry tries to connect past and present he is haunted by dreams of Australia and of his youth. Yet is Parry all he seems?
Island of LightningRRP £9.99NOW £6.99The author travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself.
The Keys of BabylonRRP 8.99NOW £6.29This Wales Book of the Year-shortlisted and Edge Hill-longlisted collection of 15 linked stories gives voices to migrants around the globe. The Keys of Babylon is both a fictional record of, and an exploration into their lives, and the characters reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion as their stories intertwine to create the final narrative.
Sea HollyRRP £7.99NOW £5.59Sea Holly is Robert Minhinnick’s stuning debut novel, a story of drifting, burnt-out lives, shadowed by the mysterious disappearance of a vivacious young girl.“John Vine? He has it all. Home, family, career. You can’t knock that. But he has this worm inside him, this dissatisfaction… A boy of twenty, that’s OK, he’s going to dream. But a man of fifty? With a young piece who thinks he’s not half bad?…believe me that’s when everything’s going to come loose.That’s when it’s going to get dangerous.”Sea Holly was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
To Babel and BackRRP £7.99NOW £5.59Join 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.
BadlandsRRP £6.95NOW £4.86In these essays the writer travels from the impoverished of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley. On the way he encounters a foreign country called England, twenty thousand frozen lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones. The people of Badlands include Coleridge and Ryan Giggs, Colonel Sanders and Freud, plus a host of minor deities from the numbing world of celebrity. Urban and rural, tragic and absurd, Badlands is a real place. But where the borders of Badlands begin, or finish, is difficult to say.
Green AgendaRRP £7.95NOW £5.56In the 1970s, it was ignorance, in the 1980s, enthusiasm, and from the 1990s environmental issues were greeted with a peculiar fatalism. Green Agenda, the first popular volume of its type to be published in Wales, confronts head on our ideas of what constitutes ’the environment’ and how we perceive it. These essays acknowledge the danger of allowing environmental concern to flourish within a green ghetto, the perils of over-speculation, the banality of ’issues’.
Watching the Fire-eaterRRP 8.99NOW £6.29Watching the Fire-eater covers 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 essay 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. Watching the Fire-eater was the Wales Book of the Year Award winner, 1993.
Hey FatmanRRP £5.95NOW £4.16Hey Fatman by Robert Minhinnick is full of the rich, sometimes strange, always telling, detail that we have come to expect from one of Britain’s most compelling poets. The book opens with poems set in and around his home country of south Wales, and includes a sequence based on the history of an ancestral house, Dunraven. We then move on to work inspired by the poet’s travels in South America and the U.S.A. This includes the title poem ’Hey Fatman’, a splendid baroque essay on the characters gathered in a Rio beach bar.
 
 
Find a great selection of books by our other legendary writers on the Year of Legends page.
 
 
 

Martyn Crucefix’s new collection, The Lovely Disciplines, is newly available from Seren. 
Composed with his characteristic grace and precision, these new poems step straight into a contemporary world where cursors blink, people Skype, consult Google Street View, make erotically-charged visits to the opticians, find ATM receipts in second-hand books of poetry. Such acuteness of observation is one of the ‘lovely disciplines’ in these vivid, exploratory poems that surprise and delight with portraits of a motor-biking boy-racer, strange meetings at Heathrow, and images from Crucefix’s native Wiltshire: a toll cottage, the West Kennet long barrow, the weir at Tellisford.
Discover The Lovely Disciplines: £9.99
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