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Seren will be celebrating International Women’s Day by offering you some fantastic books by women writers at a discounted rate.
The following titles, some by award winning authors, will be available for only £5 from 8am-8pm on 8th of March 2012. This offer is exclusive to the Seren website.
Mavis Nicholson What Did you do in the War, Mummy? Clare Dudman A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, Zillah Bethell Seahorses are Real and Le temps des cerises, Nia Williams The Colour of Grass, Ellie Evans The Ivy Hides the Fig Ripe Duchess, Judy Brown Loudness, Candy Neubert Foreign Bodies, Carol Rumens De Chirico’s Threads and Carolyn Jess-Cooke Inroads
Thursday 8th March 2012 8am-8pm

Congratulations to Robert Minhinnick who has made the shortlist for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Robert Minhinnick’s short story ‘El Aziz: some notes from his notebooks’ is shortlisted along side 5 other short story writers including, Emma Donoghue, Linda Oatman High and Kevin Barry. From 5th March all six shortlisted stories will be available in an anthology, which is being published by Waterstones. The winner will be announced on the 30th March.
To keep up-to-date with all new titles out in 2012, you can sign up for our free email newsletter – click here. When you purchase books via the website you can also save 20% by joining our free online book club, it takes minutes to enter your information.
Like us on Facebook Seren Books and/ or follow us on Twitter @SerenBooks

Seren will be celebrating International Women’s Day by offering you some fantastic books by women writers at a discounted rate.

The following titles, some by award winning authors, will be available for only £5 from 8am-8pm on 8th of March 2012. This offer is exclusive to the Seren website.

What Did you do in the War, Mummy? Frank and vivid stories from a wonderfully varied collection of women who talk to Mavis Nicholson about their lives during the second world war. Their frank and vivid stories reveal intimate details of how they lived, worked, loved and coped in those years. Foreword by Dame Vera Lynne. “A wonderful read” Paul O’Grady

A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees by Clare Dudman is a lyrical and insightful evocation of the trials of the first Welsh Patagonian colonists as they battle to survive hunger, loss, and each other. Impoverished and oppressed, they’d been promised paradise on earth: a land flowing with milk and honey. But what the settlers found after a devastating sea journey, was a cold South American desert where nothing could survive except tribes of nomadic Tehuelche Indians, possibly intent on massacring them.

Seahorses are real by Zillah Bethelll is a powerful debut novel of love and damage. Zillah Bethell tells the haunting tale of a relationship warped by depression, at once tender and destructive, where violence is not only perpetrated by men and love is not necessarily enough. “Savage and tender, Seahorses are real is a rich, unflinching fantasy of love and abuse.” Kate Bingham

Le temps des cerisesby Zillah Bethell. Paris is under siege, its citizens are starving and the only way out is by hot air balloon from the Gare du Nord. But for 17-year-old Eveline Renan the topsy-turvy world of 1870s warfare is both dreadful and infuriating, a state of affairs which her drunken father and the insipid poetry of her fiancé do little to redeem. Into this Rabelaisian world enters sister Bernadine, a nun with a past, whose best friends, Sister Agnes, has just surprised everyone by giving birth and now lies dying in her convent cell. The resulting mayhem throws into relief the absurdity, glories and tragedies of warfare, and the decisions of those forced to question their own ways of living, or dying, amongst the pandemonium around them.

The Colour of Grass by Nia Williams is a story about families, past and present, and life’s unexpected connections. Helen’s family is falling apart. There are no answers from her husband. She can’t communicate with her daughter. So she turns to other relatives: the ones who are dead and gone. Straightaway she finds herself floundering in a new world of friends, secrets, enemies and family history enthusiasts. Clandestine meetings, a mugging, and the surprisingly tragic story of her mystery grandmother – all of these weave themselves into Helen’s present and her unknown past. “This read will draw you into its story within minutes” Woman Magazine

The Ivy Hides the Fig Ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ “…The Ivy Hides the Fig Ripe Duchess successfully leads the reader through strange places and strong emotion. I very much enjoyed the trip.” Poetry Wales

Judy Brown’s beautiful first collection of poetry is called Loudness. A straightforward manner and a gift for ironic humour belie the artful complexities and the exacting observations evident in her work. Titles like ‘The ExPats’, ‘The P45′, The Crash’, kick start edgy narratives featuring characters who will suffer their modern sins. Alternatively there are also disquisitions on colour, perception, ex-angels, spontaneous combustions and other mysterious phenomena. This debut collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection in 2011

A beautifully written first novel, Foreign Bodies by Candy Neubert explores the spaces between people, and the nature of encounters in romantic idylls on the other side of the world. Fresh from the UK, Emma thinks she has fallen in love with a place, a person, and pursues the man of her dreams with a colonial zeal. But for all her poetic sensibilities, she seems unaware of the destruction she is capable of leaving in her wake.

De Chirico’s Threads, the new collection of poems from Carol Rumens features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the  life and work of the Italian painter Georges De Chirico, as well as forty pages of distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK’s best poets. An acute socio-political awareness, sometimes satirical, sometimes tender, inspires a number of pieces such as the distopian vision of ‘2084’, while ‘The Tadpole goddess’, is a clever alternative nature poem.

Inroads is a debut collection from a startling new talent Carolyn Jess-Cooke who has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun. The opening piece, ‘Accent’  where ‘stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own’ is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, “The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory…”.  This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multi-faceted and often paradoxical. ‘Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube’ is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms. Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010.

Get these fantatsic titles for £5 (plus p&p) on the 8th March 2012 8am – 8pm.

Please feel free to leave feedback on these books or any other Seren titles you may have read – we always love to hear your comments!

Paul Henry will be reading live on the Radio 4 request programme ‘Poetry Please’ on Monday 18th March.

Congratulations to Robert Minhinnick! Robert is one of twenty authors long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2012. ‘El Aziz: some pages from his notebooks’ is the long-listed story from his new collection The Keys of Babylon. The 2012 list includes Diana Athill, Lionel Shriver, Emma Donoghue and Will Cohu. The shortlist will be announced on the 4th March 2012, with each shortlisted author receiving a £1,000 prize. The winner will be announced on the 30th March 2012.
Meet the Author
Thursday 1st March 7.30pm: The Mabingion reinvented by two of Wales’s most talented young authors, Meirion Jordan (with his new poetry collection, Regeneration) and Fflur Dafydd with her new book in Seren’s popular ‘Mabinogion’ prose series, The White Trail. Come celebrate St.David’s Day with us. Media Point Room, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff £2.50
Friday 2nd March, 10am – 1pm: Walking on Legends with Paul Henry, Mynydd Llangors, Powys. A literary walk across the hill that shaped Henry’s early poetry. Part of the Crickhowell Walking Festival and sponsored by ‘Book-ish’ book shop. Cost is £5.00 and the meeting point is Crickhowell town centre.
To keep up-to-date with all new titles out in 2012, you can sign up for our free email newsletter – click here. When you purchase books via the website you can also save 20% by joining our free online book club, it takes minutes to enter your information.
Like us on Facebook Seren Books and/ or follow us on Twitter @SerenBooks
 

Jonah Jones (1919-2004), the Welsh sculptor, writer and artist-craftsman, worked in many media, but is especially remembered as a sculptor in stone, lettering-artist and calligrapher.
Join us for the launch of the new book Jonah Jones: An Artist’s Life. Kooywood Gallery, 8 Museum Place, Cardiff. CF10 3BG Friday 3rd February 2012 6.30pm-8.30pm (refreshments)

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“He was not merely a sculptor, an author, a painter, a stone-letterer and a calligrapher: he was an artist, believing in the unity of art, its life-enhancing power in all its forms, and sculpting his whole life around the conviction.” Jan Morris
To keep up-to-date with all new titles out in 2012, you can sign up to our free email newsletter – click here. When you purchase books via our website you can also save 20% by joining our free online book club, it takes minutes to enter your information.
Like us on Facebook Seren Books and/ or follow us on Twitter @SerenBooks
 

Congratulations to Dannie Abse, as he becomes a CBE for his services to Poetry and Literature in the Queen’s New Year Honours List. Dannie Abse won the Wales Book of the Year in 2008 for The Presence, which he wrote after his wife died in a car crash. “When you’ve been given a compliment, I’ve learned to say thank you,” said the poet. He said the honour also let him reflect on his late brother Leo, who dies in 2008 and was known as a social reforming MP for Pontypool and then the new constituency of Torfaen.
Seren previously published Intermittent Journals, Welsh Retrospective and There Was a Young Man from Cardiff  by Dannie Abse.
To keep up-to-date with all new titles out in 2012, you can sign up to our free email newsletter – click here. When you purchase books via our website you can also save 20% by joining our free online book club, it takes minutes to enter your information.
Like us on Facebook Seren Books and/ or follow us on Twitter @SerenBooks

Seren will be closing for the Christmas holiday at the close of business, Friday 23rd December 2011 and will be re-opening on the 3rd January 2012.
You can still order online throughout the Christmas period, please allow for an extra couple of days for despatch.
We want to take this opportunity to thank you for your support throughout 2011. We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Seren have released a book of unique images of Wales’ rugby team at the World Cup 2011, from official tournament photographers, GettyImages. Heads Held High is a must have memento for all Wales rugby fans: fantastic Christmas gift. With the Foreword by Phil Bennett and the Afterword by Max Boyce. Available now!
For two weeks in October, Wales held its breath. In the Rugby World Cup, with an influx of young players and probably the most exciting rugby played in the competition, Wales had negotiated a difficult qualifying group to reach a quarter final against an unbeaten Ireland side.
Ireland were despatched 22:10; next up was a France side which had misfired throughout the tournament. In New Zealand and at home, Wales believed: over 60,000 people watched the game at the Millennium Stadium. But injuries to key players, missed kicks, and the sending off of skipper Sam Warburton meant that Wales came up just short in a grippingly tense match they dominated. And defeat against Australia in their last game left Wales fourth. Yet this was still a time for celebration. Wales had lost to three of the world’s top sides by a collective margin of five points. It couldn’t have been closer, and the Wales squad could return home confident for the future and with their heads held high.
Max Boyce is a comedian, singer and cultural icon, closely associated with Wales’ national sport. Phil Bennett is one of Wales’ most famous fly-halves. He played for Llanelli, Wales, the Barbarians and the British Lions. He is now a television commentator and newspaper columnist.

Seren News
 
Patrick McGuinness finds his debut novel The Last Hundred Days on the 2011 Costa First Novel Award shortlist.
 
Seren have published Wales’ Rugby World Cup 2011 in images, Heads Held High. Foreword by Phil Bennett and Afterword by Max Boyce
 
Congratulations to future Seren poet Rhian Edwards on winning both the audience award and the John Tripp final 2011. Rhian’s debut collection is due out in Spring 2012. No other John Tripp winner has won both awards.
 
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