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The Longest Farewell
‘The finest and most anguished account of what dementia is really like. It explores and explains grief, the loss of a living person and the guilt of loving again in a way which draws you in… but ends with the message that we can live in hope and happiness after tragedy has struck.’ – Joanna Lumley When Nula’s husband James, a documentary film-maker, becomes forgetful they put it down to the stress of his work. But his behaviour becomes more erratic and inexplicable, and he is diagnosed with Pick’s Disease, an early onset and aggressive form of dementia. Suddenly their lives change from comfortable middle-class creatives through unexplainable behaviour, the shock of diagnosis, coping with the ongoing illness, not coping with the illness, to the indignities of care home life. The Longest Farewell is a moving description of James’ utter mental and physical deterioration, and the effect that it had …
Anne Cluysenaar
Anne Cluysenaar was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1936, the daughter of the Belgian-Scottish artist John Cluysenaar and his wife, the painter Sybil Fitzgerald Hewat. The family moved to Britain just before the outbreak of World War II. Cluysenaar studied French and English literature at Trinity College, Dublin before pursuing her career in academia, where she lectured in literature, linguistics and creative writing at universities including Manchester, Dublin, Aberdeen, Lancaster, Birmingham and Cardiff. Cluysenaar was committed to writing poetry from a young age, and believed that the Welsh landscape impacted her work. Her collections include A Fan of Shadows (1967), Nodes (1971), Double Helix (1982) and Batu-Angas, Envisioning Nature with Alfred Russel Wallace (2008). Cluysenaar has also been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and founded and edited multiple literary journals and magazines, including Sheaf and Scintilla. In the later years of her life, Cluysenaar ran a smallholding in Monmouthshire. Cluysenaar passed away in 2014.
163 Days
Winner of Wordsworth Prize for Literature & Poetry at Lakeland Book of the Year 2023 Longlisted for the Barbellion Prize Highly Commended in the Forward Prize “Hannah Hodgson takes us to the paradoxical heart of poetry itself: to be held inside a pain both intensified and soothed by the sheer brilliant presence of the poet’s mind.” – Caroline Bird Hannah Hodgon is an award-winning poet and a palliative care patient. In her compelling debut collection 163 Days, she uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness. 163 Days is the length of Hannah’s longest period of hospitalisation to date. In this long poem, she probes various truths, personal and medical; truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The speaker is a teenager on the cusp of …
Let Me Tell You What I Saw
Let Me Tell You What I Saw is the first ever publication as a dual-language (English/Arabic) text of substantial extracts from Adnan Al-Sayegh’s ground-breaking epic poem, Uruk’s Anthem, one of the longest poems ever written in Arabic literature, which gives voice to the profound despair of the Iraqi experience. This superb translation brings the eloquent original Arabic epic to a new readership. Uruk’s Anthem has been described as beautiful, powerful and courageous and at the same time apocalyptic and terrifying in its unwavering scrutiny of, and opposition to, oppression and dictatorship wherever it occurs in the world. Fusing ancient Arabic and Sumerian poetic traditions with many innovative and experimental features of both Arabic and Western literature, Uruk’s Anthem might best be described as a modernist dream poem that frequently strays into nightmare; yet it is also imbued with a unique blend of history, mythology, tenderness, lyricism, humour and surrealism. It …
Long Haul Travellers
Some of the journeys in this collection can be found on maps. But some travellers are journeying from one self to another, like those strange adventurers Murat Reis and Tristan Jones. Some, like Adwaitya the tortoise, have traversed time as well as space. Some travel in dreams. And the longest-haul travellers of all are the dead, like Josephine, whose memory returns to haunt our consciousness and remind us that not all places can be found in the atlas. Elisions, displacements, journeys, memories of journeys, dreams: this new collection of poems by Sheenagh Pugh has a pervasive elegiac quality. Known for her incisive narratives, many of these new poems work more by implication than explication. She uses a shorter line, briefer description and when there is dialogue it is often minimalist, oblique, refracted through camera or computer or telephone line. A typical protagonist is a bearded, anonymous elderly gentleman struck by …
Real Cambridge
“I shall put this on the shelf next to Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’ and Alan Moore’s ‘Jerusalem’ where it will conspire and whisper the secrets of time and place with its companions.” – Simon Satori Hendley “Setting to work in one of the most over-interpreted cities on earth, Grahame Davies pitches for the margins, subtle undercurrents and overwritten terrains of Cambridge. This light-touch genial pyschogeographer seeks the company of a series of Virgilian guides to its habits and haunts, and the consequences are revelatory. For such reasons this warm and personal book stands a league apart from the scores of gushing screeds on the branded city and its ossified centre.” – Michael Hrebeniak Cambridge: the right brain of Oxbridge, the composite capital city of Clever. For eight centuries, this quiet English seat of learning has been one half of history’s longest-running academic arms race. When it comes to stockpiling Nobel Prizes, only that Ivy League …
Nula Suchet
Nula Suchet was born in Ireland, part of a large family. After a difficult early life she became an interior designer who worked internationally in the UK, Europe and the US. Now retired, she lives in London with her husband, the broadcaster John Suchet, who she met in the care home where their spouses were being cared for with dementia. Her book, The Longest Farewell, on dealing with her husband’s dementia and the heartbreak that came with it is available now.
Seren Christmas Gift Guide 2020
It comes around every year – the struggle of finding a gift for that hard-to-buy-for family member. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with the Seren Christmas Gift Guide. Refreshed for 2020, we’ve grouped together our top suggestions, old and new, across a range of interests to help make that decision a little bit easier. Festive Favourites Twelve Poems for Christmas Ed. Amy Wack: £5.00 This sparkling selection of Christmas poems is the perfect stocking filler for any poetry addict. These are poems full of feeling that resist cliché, that touch on classic ‘Christmas’ themes, but bring them to life from fresh perspectives. The pamphlet opens with Pippa Little’s lyrical and tender poem, ‘St. Leonore and the Robin’, and features poems both humorous and contemplative. Small enough to send with (or instead of) a card, this is the perfect festive treat for your loved ones. Christmas in Wales Ed. …
Seren Stay-at-Home Series Archive
Rewatch the Seren Stay-at-Home Series on our Youtube channel archive now!
Seren Gift Guide: Give the Perfect Gift this Christmas
We all have them. That one person in the family who is impossible to buy presents for. They’re very particular so food or alcohol is out of the question and you bought them novelty socks last year so what are you going to do? Buy them a book of course! Here at Seren we’ve got books to suit everyone: fiction addicts, nature lovers, poetry fanatics, art & photography connoisseurs, history buffs, current affairs enthusiasts, fans of biography & memoir – the list goes on. Here are a selection of our top suggestions for those difficult to buy for family members to help you give the perfect gift this Christmas. Books for Fiction Addicts Significance by Jo Mazelis £9.99 Lucy Swann is trying on a new life. She’s cut and dyed her hair and bought new clothes, but only gets as far as a small town in northern France when …
Announcing the Seren Stay-at-Home Series Programme!
Beginning on Tuesday 12th May, we will be bringing you the Seren Stay-at-Home Series – ten days of online readings, interviews and Q&As with our fantastic authors. Browse the full programme below. Buy Tickets Here* *All ticket holders will receive an exclusive 30% discount code to use on the Seren website. This code can be applied to any order but can only be redeemed once per user. Date: Tuesday 12th May Time: 7:30pm Location: Online via Zoom Tickets: £5 Robert Minhinnick: Nia, interviewed by Jon Gower Nia Vine is about to fulfil her dream of exploring an unmapped cave system. With her will go two friends brought up in the same seaside town. As they explore, Nia finds herself obsessed by a series of dreams that lead to a shocking revelation. Newly longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, Nia is the latest novel from award-winning author Robert Minhinnick. Join us …
10 Books for International Women’s Day
To celebrate International Women’s Day we’ve put together a list of ten books by and about women which you should read. In Her Own Words – Alice Entwistle In Her Own Words: Women Talking Poetry and Wales is a collection of interviews with women poets from Wales. The interviews variously explore topics ranging from personal biography, the complex joys and strains of balancing life with art, issues of cultural politics, gender, family life, to the women’s often contrasting experiences of various kinds of change, including political devolution. Buy now The Black Place – Tamar Yoseloff The Black Place is a dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, offers antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. The central sequence in this collection, ‘Cuts’, is a characteristically tough look at the poet’s cancer diagnosis and treatment. The diagnosis arrives at the same time as the …
