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Booking is now open for ‘The Wild Life of Poems’ – a poetry writing course at Chateau Ventenac in the South of France with Pascale Petit, 17th – 23rd May 2014. For more details visit the website HERE. To book visit the Chateau website HERE, Email [email protected] or phone Julia in the Languedoc: +44 (0) 7773 206344 or 0033 671 894990

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.

Pascale Petit was commissioned by the A. M. Qattan Foundation to write fifteen poems for an artbook collaboration,Effigies, with Lawand Al-Attar on the occasion of his his first solo UK exhibition ‘Lawand: Equinox, Between Beirut and London’ at The Mosaic Rooms. The exhibition opens on 4th October. Pascale will be running a workshop at the Mosaic Rooms on 14th October and the book will be launched on 19th October at 12 noon at a discussion between Lawand and Pascale about poetry and art. Further information about both these events can be found on our listings pages HERE.

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This September marks the 90th birthday of  author, Dannie Abse.
 
To celebrate this special occasion, Literature Wales invite’s you to join Dannie for a delicious meal at the Mughal Emperor, Cowbridge’s award-winning Indian restaurant, on Monday the 30th September at 7pm.
 
Poet, novelist and dramatist, Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff. Over the years Dannie has worked extensively with Seren, from advising founder Cary Archard in our infancy, to publishing several award winning books with Seren including: There Was a Young Man From Cardiff, Welsh Retrospective, Intermittent journals and The View from Row G
 
his most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas, was published in 2002 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003 his New and Collected Poems received the Special Commendation of the Poetry Book Society, and his book of poetry, Running Late received the Roland Mathias Prize in 2007. The Presence, was the winner of the 2008 Wales Book of the Year Award. 
 
The evening’s celebrations will feature the presentation of a specially commissioned poem dedicated to Dannie by National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke.
 
Tickets are £23 per person and can be booked by contacting Literature Wales on: 029 2047 2266 / [email protected]

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Rhian Edwards’ Clueless Dogs is named Wales book of the year 2013. Rhian claimed the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry ahead of fellow Seren author, Deryn Rees-Jones, (Burying the Wren) and Picador’s Samantha Wynn-Rhydderch (Banjo), before going on to be named as Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013. Rhian also scooped the Peoples Choice Award at the awards ceremony held at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
The Wales Book of the Year is awarded annually to the best Welsh and English-language works of literary criticism across three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. The winner of each category receives £2000 and goes forward to be considered for the Wales Book of the Year Award, with the overall winner receiving a further £6000.
The poems chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although Clueless Dogs is Edwards’ first collection, it has been highly praised and was the Winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry 2011/12. It was also on the 2012 shortlist for the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection.
Those dogs aren’t so clueless after all!

Marianne Burton’s She Inserts the Key is on this years shortlist for the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, whilst Christopher Meredith’s ‘The Record Keepers’, taken from his collection Air Histories has been highly commended.
The awards are among the most coveted poetry prizes in Britain. Previous recipients of the First Collection award include Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Kate Clanchy, Tishani Doshi and Sam Riviere. Seren authors Hilary Menos (who won in 2010) and Kathryn Simmonds (2008) have their second collections published this year.
The Winner will be announced in October and will receive a £5,000 prize.
Although this is her first full length book, Marianne is no stranger to  awards. Her pamphlet The Devil’s Cut was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2007 and she has won  and been placed in a number of competitions including Mslexia, TLS, Edwin Morgan, Bridport, and Cardiff International.

Summer 2013 and Seren launches its first-ever ebook exclusive, containing nine selected short stories absolutely free! Available to download from June 15, Seren Shorts includes top stories from our two recent spring collections, All the Souls by Mary-Ann Constantine and The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick. There are also stories from four other collections – which are also newly available as ebooks in our summer e-short story extravaganza.
These are: Pumping Up Napoleon by Maria Donovan; The Woman who Loved an Octopus by Imogen Herrad; My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones and The Great Master of Ecstasy by Glenda Beagan. Add in stories from Sunday-Times shortlisted The Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick and Edgehill prize-winning collection Touch by Graham Mort, plus Wales Book of the Year shortlisted The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys (coming soon on ebook) for a great free summer read.
You can download a free copy from the following links:
Kindle: http://amzn.to/1aF4fYO
Kobo: http://bit.ly/1cU33gN

 Seren is celebrating after the announcement that two poets – Rhian Edwards and Deryn Rees-Jones – are shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Award, the poetry category of Wales Book of the Year 2013.

Rhian Edwards is a winner of the John Tripp Award, and her debut Clueless Dogs was previously shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. “Poetry has never sounded so alive” – Cerys Matthews. “An astounding Welsh poet with performances that get you in the emotional gut…” – Ian McMillan
Deryn Rees-Jones’ Burying the Wren was also on the shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize, and a Poetry Books Society Recommendation. “A major event and achievement in the poetry of these islands.” – Ian Duhig. “A powerful, deeply moving collection…” – John Burnside. 
Also shortlisted for The Roland Mathias Prize was Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch with Banjo (Picador). For full details and the shortlists in Fiction and Non-fiction and Welsh-language books, visit Wales Book of the Year where you can watch a video of the announcement and discussion by the Chairs of Judges Alun Gibbard and Jasper Fforde.

I am fortunate enough to work in both bookselling and publishing. Books and bookselling are my passion but time and time again, myself and fellow booksellers are faced with this very common scenario:

Customer: have you got ………….. in stock?

Bookseller: Yes, we do, I’ll go and get it for you.

Bookseller brings the book back and the customer has a good look through. After a while the customer comes to the desk and says one of several things:

– Do you price-match?

– Thanks, I’ve had a good look, I definitely want it but I can get it cheaper online.

– Is it on offer?

Our answer is No. We don’t price-match

The customer will then discard the book and nonchalantly stroll out, no doubt thinking, great, I’ve seen the book and I’m going to save myself 75 pence (or some-such price)by buying it online (despite the fact that it just cost £5 to park the car, petrol on top, for a day of browsing). We’ve all done it. At this point I want to shout after the customer:

Wait! Do you have any idea how much work goes into the making of a book?

So, if I were to sit the customer down, I would say this:

Books are not only tangible but elemental and alchemical things. Books hold the essence of what it means to exist; they depict the human voice, the human idea and the human imagination. They help us to understand others and ourselves. So, a book is not simply a single manufactured thing like a fork or a lampshade – it holds so much more within. But not just this, the production line for a book is complex. If you take into consideration the length of time it takes for a single tree to grow from a sapling into an adult, the effort for that tree to be responsibly felled and countless others in order to make paper; to the thousands of (unpaid) hours the author spends writing, re-writing and editing the work. And then, the time comes when the work is accepted by an editor, who then takes months to edit the book into publishable standard, then it goes out to designers, proofreaders, typesetters and marketing plans are created, then, eventually the book reaches the bookshelves and the booksellers sell.

All that work for a £7.99 paperback. Not a bad price, considering.

Pricing has always been a contentious issue, both in publishing and bookselling and it has been said in both workplaces that neither side wants to create this ‘bargain culture’. Under the previous MD, Waterstones endorsed the ‘pile high, sell cheap’ model where poor booksellers were knee deep in Jeremy Clarkson autobiographies and other celebrities, which didn’t sell. This didn’t work and jeopardised the future of an already ailing company. Why? Because Waterstones is not a supermarket and the majority of its customers are more discerning (thankfully) and they want range and diversity and a decent bookshop on their high street, but in order to have these things they must understand that books are the price they are for a reason and if the corporate tax avoiding giants such as Amazon are allowed to set the bar, there will no longer be that range and diversity. We, in the bookselling industry have a duty to the public and ourselves not to price ourselves out of business altogether.

So how low should we go? And what are customers coming into bookshops to buy?

As we see the fiction section depleting to create room for ‘related products’, things which are the accessories to books: notebooks, mugs with quotes, games, tea-towels, etc. Over the birthday cards and mugs, we find our answer: A relatively new and very exciting phenomenon designed to propel any author to international status via viral bookselling – the cyber store of social media – a sometimes dirty word, a guilty pleasure or an essential (depending on your view):

The ereader

The ebook

I am told that more people are buying books than ever before thanks to this little device. The only difference being that these are electronic – virtual. Despite the resistance of those traditionalists, who want to smell the pages of a good book as they turn them (myself included). People’s reading habits have changed as well as their shopping habits and we must stay abreast of this, but we have to strike a balance – of course an eBook is a little cheaper to produce without the print costs, but they still cost time and money to produce and I would go so far as to say, they should be no cheaper than an average paperback. The publishing and bookselling industry should still be able to make a profit as those who sell the device do. After all, a kindle isn’t much without the literature to read on it

Those who still want to buy a book in a shop will still continue to do so and ebooks shouldn’t just be an alternative but an additional to the pleasures of reading. A bookshop should be of the highest quality and reflect that of its books: to be as inviting on the outside as it is on the inside. A customer said to me recently: I don’t like shopping online; I see things in here that I would never have come across had I not entered the shop.

So, when a customer comes into the bookshop they should not be expecting ‘cheaper’ but ‘quality’ and ‘choice’. I sincerely hope this is not an irreversible circumstance of our time and that we can survive the recession, the rent hikes and the undercutting by Amazon and Tesco, etc. and when I am asked, should we discount? I still say no, we should price a book at its worth otherwise those customers who so nonchalantly use our shops to browse, will come into town one day and find that we are no longer here and they have to go to Asda to browse through a choice of ten mass-market productions. A horrible thought.

Rebecca Parfitt