Following a successful round of recruitment earlier this year, we’re excited to introduce the four new Directors joining Seren’s Board.
Rachel Dawson is a writer based in Cardiff. Her debut novel, Neon Roses, was published by John Murray Press and short-listed for both the Betty Trask Prize and Wales Book of the Year. She is currently working as a Communications Associate at Common Wealth theatre, and has experience of working in the third sector.
Megan Farr is a Lecturer in Publishing at Bath Spa University and has over 20 years of experience in publishing and literature promotion in Wales and London. Currently pursuing a PhD on internationalising Welsh children’s publishing, her research spans publishing studies, children’s literature, and translation. Megan speaks Italian and French and is a Welsh learner.
Taz Rahman is a poet, editor and literary content creator. His first poetry collection East of the Sun, West of the Moon was published in 2024. He is an editor of the climate emergency journal Modron, founder of Wales’ first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet and chairs the Reader’s Committee for Poetry Wales magazine.
Elena Vaughan is a solicitor specialising in Employment law and HR. Elena is a fluent Welsh speaker and enjoys learning new languages. She is currently studying Spanish. In her spare time, Elena enjoys travelling abroad and relaxing on a beach with a good book or two.
Seren’s Board of Directors now includes eleven members with Duncan Campbell currently acting as Interim Chair after Sarah Morse stepped down from the role at the beginning of the year. Duncan has extensive experience working in the publishing industry, particularly academic and scholarly publishing. He is currently Executive Director for the Copyright Clearance Centre.
We hope you will join us in giving the new Directors a warm welcome. They join the Board at exciting time following the approval of our new Business Plan. Along with the rest of our Directors they will be actively supporting Seren staff with implementing the new plan as well as contributing to regular Board meetings.
We would also like to thank Sarah Morse for her five years as Chair of the Board at Seren, and are pleased that she will be remaining as a member of the Board.
Seren’s poetry list continues to go from strength to strength under the careful guidance of our poetry editors Rhian Edwards and Zoë Brigley. As 2023 draws to a close, we’re delighted to announce the full list of fantastic collections we’ll be publishing between April 2024 and March 2025.
Our poetry list continues to champion new and established authors from both Wales and beyond. Popular Seren authors such as Tony Curtis, Carrie Etter, Grahame Davies, Katrina Naomi, Kathryn Bevis, and Maggie Harris are on the list alongside voices new to Seren such as Lorcán Black, Betty Doyle, Wendy Allen, Emily Cotterill and Bethany Handley.
Keep an eye on our website and social media channels in the new year for more information about each of these exciting collections.
Don’t forget we also have two great collections publishing in February 2024. Cormorant by Elizabeth Parker and East of the Sun, West of the Moon by Taz Rahman. Keep an eye out for more information about each of these in the new year.
Welcome to Seren’s Non-Fiction Christmas Gift Guide. Find the perfect gift for avid fans of memoir, essays, the great outdoors and much more. Browse our specially selected titles below, or visit our non-fiction pages for more inspiration.
Are You Judging Me Yet?, Kim Moore
In Are You Judging Me Yet? Kim Moore explores the relationship between poetry and everyday sexism, in a series of lyrical essays. They draw on her experience of writing and performing the poems in her Forward Prize-winning collection All The Men I Never Married to examine the dynamics of being a female poet performing in a public space.
Are You Judging Me Yet? is designed to encourage readers to make their own connections between the essays. Each chapter ends with a choice of sections to read next, as well as connecting the essays to poems from All The Men I Never Married.
Jen Jones has written an expanded version of Welsh Quilts, her authoritative guide to the history and art of the quilt in Wales. Kaffe Fassett, the doyenne of textiles, provides a Foreword for this new edition, which also includes a greater number of images of quilt designs – some published for the first time – in a beautifully produced, detailed and generously illustrated book. Welsh Quilts explores the origins of quilting and blanket making in Wales before considering its peak period between 1870 and the Second World War when wholecloth, frame-made quilts became the standard for which the country was famous.
The Edge of Cymru is the story of Julie Brominicks’ walk around Wales in the course of a year. As an educator she knew a lot about the country’s natural resources. But as a long established incomer from England and more recent Welsh learner, she wanted to know more about its history, about Wales today, and her place in it.
Brominicksʼ observations of the places and people she meets on her journey make a fascinating alternative travelogue about Wales and the lives its people live. Her writing is lyrical, with engaging and striking coinages and images which carry the reader along too, entertained and informed. A quest of personal discovery, the narrative of The Edge of Cymru is also a refreshingly different way of looking at place, identity, memory and belonging.
Bar 44: Tapas y Copas celebrates Spanish food and drink in equal measure. These delicious recipes – each tried and tested in the busy Bar 44 restaurants – elevate traditional Spanish cuisine to exciting new heights with dishes which look good and taste even better.
Bask in the passion of two of the most knowledgeable people celebrating modern Spanish food, drink and culture in the UK. More than just a cookbook, Bar 44: Tapas y Copas is a must-have experience which packs fun, food and flavour between the covers of a beautifully designed book.
The Golden Valley: A Visual Biography of the Garw, Phil Cope
The Golden Valley is a personal account in words and photographs of the Garw where Phil Cope has lived for thirty-five years.
In it he explores the valley’s history: sparsely worked agriculture; boom-town coal exploitation; sudden, followed by gentle, post-industrial decline; attempts at re-invigoration through heritage and leisure; and now, existing in a post-covid world. This is a classic example of close-knit communities shattered by the removal of the thing that bound them together. The valley’s natural beauty – some might say returning natural beauty – is also present, from the minutiae of the lichen on its windswept trees to the river which has shaped the valley with its timeless flow.
In Cymru & I nine new writers look at what Wales means to them as people from backgrounds previously largely underrepresented. Their various viewpoints make this book a new look at Wales, or show a Wales for the most part hidden: a Wales unwritten. Here are essays on identity, integration, the power of language to welcome or divide, acceptance, personal aspiration, civic decline, and hill walking. Wales is the first official Nation of Sanctuary. Among the contributors are those who have sought sanctuary or space in Wales: immigrants – current and first or second generation – neurodivergent, LGBTQ+ and working-class people. Their articulate and compelling essays demand attention.
Wild Places UK : UK’s Top 40 Nature Sites, Iolo Williams
The UK is known for its natural beauty and its wildlife and in Wild Places UK television naturalist Iolo Williams picks his favourite forty wildlife sites from the many nature reserves around the country. From Hermaness on Shetland to the London Wetland Centre, from Dungeness in Kent to Loch Neagh, Williams criss-crosses the country. His list takes in coastal sites from marshes to towering cliffs – and distant islands – mountains, valleys, bogs, meadows, woods and land reclaimed from industry. These wild places vary in size from the vastness of The Wash to the gem that is Skomer Island. They include sites of international significance, like estuarial Slimbridge, and the wild marshes of Forsinard Flows.
Real Dorset is a discursive, humorous, idiosyncratic and personal look at Dorset. The county is famous for spectacular coastlines, historic towns, its eco-foodie reputation, for Hardy and Fowles. Yet there’s much more behind the tourist-friendly façade – subversion, rebellion and revolt, wealth and poverty, ghost stories, rich folklore, film and music.
Criss-crossing the county, Woolcott makes connections, uncovers the hidden and the forgotten. A huge and lost Neolithic earthwork contrasts with Victorian pleasure gardens and nightlife in Bournemouth. The legacy of the black GIs, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the model village of Milton Abbas, vie for attention with the importance of Dorset for writers and artists including William Barnes, T.E. Lawrence and Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Piper and Elisabeth Frink.
Over the past two centuries the South Wales Valleys have gone from idyllic rural landscape to the engine room of the British Empire to post industrial decline. Building on the success of their book Walking Cardiff, Peter Finch and John Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and how they are evolving for the twenty-first centuries in their new book Walking the Valleys.
The informative texts can be used as both a route finder and a literary entertainment in themselves. John Briggs’s lively photographs provide further detail and each walk is illustrated with a map. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and as useful as those actually pull on their boots. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner.
A Hardy Breed; Sheep Farming in Wales, Bruce Cardwell
A Hardy Breed is a collection of 120 photographs, mainly black and white, celebrating shepherding and sheep farming in Wales. It records a way of life under pressure for the past couple of centuries, and more than ever today. The book is an important social document, of reportage, portraiture and documentary photography of an industry threatened by the outcomes of Brexit and other issues, like climate change, biodiversity, agricultural developments. Importantly, many of the communities featured are centres of Welsh language and culture, also under pressure.
Waterfalls of Stars; My Ten Years on the Island of Skomer, Roseanne Alexander
When Rosanne Alexander’s boyfriend Mike was offered the job of warden of Skomer, a small uninhabited island off the south west tip of Wales, they had just ten days to leave college, marry (a condition of employment) and gather their belongings and provisions for the trip to the island. This was the first of many challenges Rosanne and Mike faced during their ten years on the nature reserve, from coping with periods of isolation when they were the island’s only inhabitants, to dwindling food supplies during the winter when rough weather made provisioning from the mainland impossible. Thrown on their own resources they had also to deal with catastrophes like the devastation of the island’s seal colony following an oil spill.
Welcome to Seren’s Fiction Christmas Gift Guide, created to help you find the perfect gift for any fiction lover this festive season. This collection of novels and short story collections are bound to please any fiction fan. You can also browse our fiction pages to discover more great titles.
The Confessions of Hilary Durwood, Euron Griffith
Eager for glory as an explorer in the further reaches of the Empire Hilary Durwood is duped into undertaking a semi-mythical mission, in semi-mythical lands. After many adventures and setbacks he returns to Victorian London destitute, dismayed at having killed someone, and seeking revenge against the Gentleman Explorer who set him up. Meanwhile a serial killer, The Slasher, stalks the streets and inevitably their paths will cross…
This dark comedy thriller is a page-turning and riotous engagement with the notions and myths of Empire, the nature of reality, the power of narrative and the gullibility of those who wish to believe, even in the face of the truth.
The short story has long been a popular form with writers and readers in Wales. The Green Bridge collects work by 25 of the country’s foremost writers of the twentieth century in an entertaining and varied anthology. Horror, satire, humour, war, tales of the aristocracy, of navvies, love, and madness, industry, the countryside, politics and sport: these stories provide insight into the changing values of Wales and the world. This is enjoyable reading for those who know Wales and its authors, and for newcomers to both.
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 her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance. Lucy’s death, like a stone thrown into a pool, sends out far-reaching ripples, altering the lives of people who never knew her as well as those of her loved ones back home.
Farmer’s daughter Beth is a child of nature, utterly at one with the rugged landscape on which she tends the farm’s sheep, in a remote valley in the Black Mountains. But change is coming. The modern world arrives with the construction of a reservoir in a neighbouring valley. Part of the mountain is taken away to build the dam; there are people, machinery, noise. Then the farms are emptied of their young men by the First World War, including Beth’s beloved brother Daniel, who goes missing in action. Her mother turns to religion, her father falls silent. Things found on the mountain is a Hardyesque coming of age story. At its heart is the dramatic landscape, which, like Beth, suffers an end to innocence. This lyrically written novel, reminiscent of Sarah Hall, marks the arrival of an appealing new voice in fiction.
In a world of uncertainties, how do human beings navigate the increasingly complex interrelations of love, desire, home, community? Each story in Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. The irreducibility of time acts as a continuo throughout the narratives and links loss with longing, hope with love and reveals the tentacular hold the past can have on all present aims and imperatives.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Scar Tissue unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
1792. Nantucket whalers are invited to found the port of Milford Haven in Wales. What does the arrival of these hardy Quakers – immigrants to America a century before – mean for the local people? And what is the meaning of the beached whale that preceded them? Two cultures rub against each other and distrust grows, driven by the local preacher. As Whaling unfolds concern swerves into hysteria against the incomers and the preacher plans a grotesque, Jonah-inspired fate for the whalers.
Nathan Munday’s debut novel is an exciting mélange of original fiction, historical writing and whaling images. In it he explores our relationship with the natural world, the boundary between faith and superstition, and the age old problem of immigration. Set in historical fact this is a narrative at once modern and contemporaneous, the writing rich in imagery and deceptively tense as its story slides into allegory.
Shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2023
Paris is an extraordinary city, never more so than during the German occupation, with all the tensions, accommodations, resistances and paradoxes which that entailed. Civilised German officers engage in Parisian culture while their colleagues torture and kill in the city; French citizens measure what needs to be sacrificed in order to survive, or to be free. Morality is more sharply in focus than ever, and more expendable.
Stretching backwards and forwards within the twentieth century, and with a cast including Picasso, Braque, Sartre, Hemingway and Lee Miller, this remarkable multi-form novel combines fiction, journals, poetry and images to investigate what war can let loose, and how evil can dominate a man. Its collage technique reflects the continual shifts of life in the city of light.
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
For Victoria, the last twenty years have been ones of migration, to Goma, then to Paris and finally to London. There she starts a new life with her youngest brother Paul, and leaves the past behind. Or so she thinks until she is suddenly confronted with the decision to reconnect with her genocide-supporting middle brother Benjamin.
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Celebrate Christmas the Welsh way in the company of some of the country’s leading writers, past and present. Christmas mass, the nativity play, turkey and plum pudding, the Mari Lwyd, presents, the weather, the shopping and post-festive blues are among the many subjects drawn from stories, poems, diaries and letters. Featuring R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, Catherine Fisher, Bruce Chatwin, Sian James, Kate Roberts and Leslie Norris, it’s guaranteed to get you in the Christmas spirit.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Daughter II’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her collection Burying the Wren. Deryn’s poem ‘Consider the Lillies’, first published by ModronMagazine, was recently Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry.
Following the retirement of Mick Felton at the end of June, Seren’s founder Cary Archard, writes this note of thanks to our long-term publisher:
Mick Felton retired at the end of June. The blog has already included entries thanking him for his seminal contribution to Seren over the years. Do read them, as they describe his work in more detail and give a clear idea of his unusual, long commitment to publishing in Wales. Here, briefly, I want to draw attention to the singularly ‘personal’ nature of that commitment. Mick never saw his job as a 9 to 5 one. Meeting with authors, designers, printers, attending launches and readings, looking at manuscripts in ‘spare’ time – meant that, in a very real sense, he was always at work. It’s true to say that the success, and survival of a small, independent publishing house depends on such a personal commitment. Management in such a role can become a personal part of your life.
In 2018, Seren published a wonderful book, Dear Mona: Letters from a Conscientious Objector, by Jonah Jones, artist, sculptor and writer. The Introduction, written by his son, begins:
‘The conversation always reached the same point. Discussing this book, Mick Felton would start “Len –”, then hesitate before continuing: “I can’t call him Len… Jonah!” Mick had known my father for over thirty years, and had published two of his books at Seren. He could be forgiven for finding it difficult to accept that the man whose war-time letters we were discussing was effectively a different person from the cherished and respected figure we both knew.’
This extract makes the point. Knowledge of the writer as a person, an individual. Publishing on a personal level. Respect for the work and the author. The extract shows you the kind of publisher Mick was and gives you an idea of the kind of atmosphere that he helped to create at Seren. Although he has retired, Mick leaves behind an entrenched legacy of caring, of business at a personal level, that will live on.
Cary Archard
Everyone at Seren wishes Mick all the best for his well-deserved retirement!
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Night Mode’ by Tamar Yoseloff from her collection The Black Place.Tamar has recently been awarded a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in recognition of her contribution to poetry.
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023, we’re highlighting a range of titles which explore various thoughts and experiences affecting women’s lives today. Find many more fantastic books written by women on our website.
This collection of lyric essays by Forward prize-winning poet Kim Moore explores at the relationship between poetry and everyday sexism. Moore examines the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – drawing on her PhD research and experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All The Men I Never Marriedwhich won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022.
The essays tackle subjects that range from heckling at poetry readings, problems with the male gaze and explorations of what the female gaze might look like in poetry to discussions about complicity, guilt and objectification, the slipperiness of the word sexism and whether poetry can be part of transformational change.
With over 250 contributors, this generous selection of poetry by women features poets from the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, and New Zealand. Arranged by thematic chapters that touch on various aspects of modern life, this anthology aims to be a touchstone of women’s thoughts and experiences; to be entertaining and relevant as well as inclusive and representative of some of the best poetry published now.
In these ‘Post-Feminist’ times, is there a need for such a book? Is the literary establishment still as dominated by men as it once was? Who gets to decide the canon? Eva Salzman opens Women’s Work with a lively polemic, making the case for the women-only anthology with characteristic wit and flair.
Maggie Harris’ short story collection Writing on Water is informed by the Caribbean, where she was born, and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. Issues of belonging and migration feature, but alongside these are growing interests in voice, narrative, gardening and botany, music and family. There are both UK and Caribbean voices in these tales, told by children, migrants, mothers, and grandparents.
Republic is about class, culture and community. It recounts the story of a young woman growing in west Wales up listening to the post-punk music of the 1980s and indie labels of the 1990s, decades which culminated in the explosion of “Cŵl Cymru” and new devolutionary powers in Wales.
Offering stories that are overheard, handed down, magnified, often translated from Welsh, this sequence of 80 prose poems creates a patchwork of narratives which share the challenges faced by women, Welsh-speakers, and other marginalised groups. This volume arose from the need to tell an alternative social history, one that commits an oral history to paper.
Vividly told, The Amazingly Astonishing Story is a classic story of a working-class girl growing up in the fifties and sixties, where dreams and reality seem irreconcilable. Her Catholic upbringing, a father torn between his daughter and his new wife, her irreverent imagination and stubborn determination to enjoy life, all mean that Lucy Gannon really does have an amazing story (including meeting the Beatles in her school grounds) as she finds her place in the world.
Lucy Gannon is the author of 8 plays and 18 TV dramas or series, including The Best of Men, Soldier Soldier, Peak Practice, Bramwell, and Dad. She won the Richard Burton Award for New Playwrights and has been writer in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
1994, Iris and Victoria are pen friends. Iris writes about her life with her family in Paris. Victoria is in a refugee camp in Goma having fled the genocide in Rwanda in which thousands are being killed. One day Victoria’s letters stop, and Iris is told she has been moved.
Twenty years later Iris, a new mother, is working as a journalist in London. As she prepares to return to work, her thoughts turn to Victoria and what might have happened to her. She pitches a story to her editor which sets her on a journey to find her pen friend. But as she follows the story, things emerge that make her question her own past. Was her father, a French government official, somehow involved in the genocide? Are her childhood memories more fiction than fact?
How have the lives of these two women, who shared a moment in time, changed in the past twenty years? As the pressure of long-kept family secrets builds, will they ever find each other?
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022
Kim Moore’s award-winning second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. A powerful collection of deeply thoughtful and deeply felt poetry.
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021
A city burns in a crisis − because the status quo has collapsed and change must come. Every value, relationship and belief is shaken and the future is uncertain.
In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. On the threshold of their futures each must make a choice: how to live in this new ‘now’. With a virtuoso control of tone, by turns elegiac, comic, lyrical, philosophical, A City Burning examines power of all types, exploring conflicts between political allegiances; between autonomy and intimacy; emotional display and concealment; resistance versus acceptance. The result is a deeply human book full of hauntingly memorable characters and narratives.
In her debut collection 163 Days Hannah Hodgson 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. In her long poem ‘163 Days’, her longest period of hospitalisation to date, she probes various truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The mundanity of hospital life is marbled by a changing landscape of mood, hope and loss. A gap yawns between the person she is, and the person in her medical notes. In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. An important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.
As we publish her new collection Republic, poet Nerys Williams gives us an insight into the music which accompanied its writing.
Listening to Republic
Writing Republic I found that post punk music of the 80s and 90s became key in an attempt to articulate a relationship between community, language and culture. Given the current preponderance of School Disco compilations, initially it might seem that retreating to the music of the 80s and 90s is another variant in communal nostalgia. This is not the intention of Republic. I believe that music carries an energy for future action and desire for change. What you learn over the years changes how you listen to those important early albums. Context shifts meaning.
Republic is an anti-memoir, it came from a need to transcribe the voices of a community (as opposed to a single voice) and a refutation of the easy and often predictable epiphanies of some memoirs. Music has a voice throughout this volume. Music is not a soundtrack or sonic wallpaper. Some of the lyrics I cite are just as beloved to me as Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
The sounds in this discography list are eclectic – moving from SKA, 80s pop, Welsh language electronica and rave to 90s shoegazing, jazz samba and classical minimalism.
I grew up in a part of West Wales which in the early 80s had an ambivalent relationship to the Welsh language. Welsh bilingual education was still an experiment. The 11+ existed to partition kids. English language music culture was king. Crucially Welsh language post punk music gave me a love of language that no primer could ever do.
In the late 1980s Fideo 9 on S4C, with is wonderful presenter Eddie Ladd, pushed boundaries. It was a relief to watch bands with strong female leads like Fiona Owen of Eirin Peryglus and Patricia Morgan from Datblygu performing in videos and asserting a space for non-rock female personas. Before the web, encountering such bands as Datblygy, Anhrefn, Y Cyrff onthe TV and at gigs arranged by Cymdeithas yr. Iaith, felt like finding a community. An outsider Wales which was vibrant and questioning.
The range was broad: moving from the reggae dub of Llwybr Llaethog, the malleable beats of Pop Negatif Wastad and guitar riffs of The Crumblowers to Traddodiad Ofnus’s socialist love letters and Tŷ Gwydr’s dance utopianism. Welsh language music was part of a global community. Datblygu could be cued between Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares and The Sugarcubes.
Republic offers a full discography. A Spotify playlist accompanies the book giving a sense not only of the period, but also issues that remain. Elfyn Presli’s “Jackboots Maggie Thatcher” and The Specials’ “Ghost Town” have not lost their resonance, or their relevance. There are some bands (especially Welsh bands from the listing above) whose work cannot be located on Spotify. Archive recordings exist on various web platforms (such as Ffarout’s YouTube channel). But I want to stress that Apple Music and Bandcamp offer ways of financially contributing to Welsh bands and labels through subscription downloads.
Writing this, on Welsh language music day 10th February 2023, I am grateful to those 1980s bands who were never able to get any sustainable income from their music, but did it anyhow. I thank those bands who loaded their vans and cars, went cross-country in the cold and rain to visit run down country hotels. I hug those band members who having travelled on B roads, played to drunken audiences. I acknowledge those experimentalists who often faced jeering or apathy. I salute the women who organised gigs and Cymdeithas cells tirelessly. I carry this archive of voices with me (with recent updates).
Nerys Williams
Full Discography (by section number)
8
Elfyn Presli ‘Jackboots Maggie Thatcher’ The First Cuts Are The Deepest (Words of Warning, 1987)
Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head (Parlaphone, 2002)
PJ Harvey Let England Shake (Island, 2011)
In her explosive new poetry collection Republic Nerys Williams opens a window on life in rural west Wales during the 1980s and 90s. English and Welsh-language post-punk bands, politics, feminism and family life are thrown together on the page as she questions what makes a republic?
