The Seren Poetry Podcast

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Glyn Edwards shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year

Cover of In Orbit by Glyn Edwards shown with a sticker reading Shortlist 2024.

We’re delighted to share that In Orbit by poet Glyn Edwards has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2024.

In Orbit is a deeply moving account of love, longing, and loss. On receiving news of a beloved teacher’s death, a man struggles with the loss of a relationship sustained by deep admiration and unrequited love. Memories of their shared journey are separated in three orbits where the man’s past, present, and future are punctuated by intense grief.

Wales Book of the Year has four categories in each language – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-fiction and Children & Young People, with one of the four category winners announced as the Overall Winner, and claiming the title Wales Book of the Year. There are twelve awards in total with a collective prize fund of £14,000. In both Welsh and English there are four category winners, one People’s Choice winner and one overall winner.

Glyn’s collection is shortlisted in the English-language Poetry Category alongside I Think We’re Alone Now by Abigail Parry (Bloodaxe Books) and Cowboy by Kandace Siobhan Walker (CHEERIO Publishing). You can view the full Welsh and English-language shortlists for all categories on the Literature Wales website. The winners will be announced in a live Award Ceremony in Caernarfon on Thursday 4th July.

In the meantime you can support your favourite book on the shortlist by voting for Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award via the Nation.Cymru and Golwg360 websites.

Vote now

Glyn Edwards was recently featured on The Seren Poetry Podcast where he chatted in depth with Sarah Johnson about In Orbit, poetry and his writing rituals. The Seren Poetry Podcast is available now on all podcast platforms.

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Friday Poem – ‘Seen’ by Rachael Clyne

Close up photograph of a person's eye. The majority of their face is in darkness other than the iris which is illuminated by a vertical strip of light.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Seen’ by Rachael Clyne from her collection You’ll Never Be Anyone Else.

Seen My winter face stares back, dares meto meet its decline. I survey my map of mishaps, try to recall when I was last held. I look at a photo of me aged twenty: her smoulder-eyed beauty, her blank-page face; waiting for its story. Mind riddled with gaps, and gob full of opinions, this body still stands, bends and carries despite subsidence. At my retina scan today, I saw the backs of my eyes like unlaid eggs, an eye-tree of scarlet tracery. The scan man said, You still have fabulous retinas.

If you missed it, catch up with Rachael’s episode of The Seren Poetry Podcast Series 2 where she discusses You’ll Never Be Anyone Else in detail with our Deputy Publisher Sarah Johnson. Search for The Seren Poetry Podcast on your favourite podcast app to listen now.

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Friday Poem – ‘Rememory’ by Nerys Williams

Snowy UK street in the morning

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rememory’ by Nerys Williams from her third collection Republic. You can listen to our in depth interview with Nerys about Republic in episode 6 of The Seren Poetry Podcast Series 2.

19. Rememory I am lost in the contorted image of a pub. I scroll back to the pedestrian image but cannot get away from a couple who have ordered their dinner and are waiting. Faces pixelated, seated at a polished table. Thankfully I see the emergency exit. My cursor and I stumble down the patterned carpet step, finally to air and traffic. I have been “home” already, though home is a walk from my ex-boyfriend’s house near a cathedral graveyard. I never noticed that we had a back gate, it was rarely warm enough to hang our washing. Bell practice every Wednesday night, even with closed shutters, ear plugs, trying to enter Californian poetry for its last glimmer of warmth – discordant knells punctuated words. Naming the plants I never saw: Meadowsweet, Queen Anne’s Lace, Morning glory. Winter’s dazzling days, snow on the morning street. Marrow-cold in a house with only a small gas fire, cotton duvets, sheeted ice, socks in bed. Desperate for a taste of sun, the philosopher and I bought avocados, mashed them, added lemon and salt, turned up the heater. Our knitted-selves toasted dappled light with each dip.
Memories of my younger self often circle gatherings at modest feasts. Follow the cursor to a café filled with coffee, panettone and ice cream, orange, pink and green sweet boxes stacked on the shelves. Or, do I turn the corner to find my student-self? Encountering a stalker past bushes and winding river, I ran home breathless, sick. The night of celebrating scholarships to the US the philosopher, filmmaker and I were manifesto making. A night imagining passage on a liner, careering to Sinatra, romanticising ourselves in steerage. The figure at my heels gaining the measure of my two-step, three-step, four-step five-step, six, seven, eight…

The full box set of The Seren Poetry Podcast Series 2 is now available to listen to on your favourite podcast app. Search for The Seren Poetry Podcast and click like, follow or subscribe to have all future episodes delivered straight to your podcast feed.

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Friday Poem – ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown

Wheels of cheese sitting on a larder shelf.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Larder’ by Judy Brown from her collection Lairs. You can listen to her talking in depth about the collection on Series 2 of The Seren Poetry Podcast. Listen and subscribe on your favourite podcast app to listen to the series so far.

The Larder In the shop’s moist basement the red wines lay prone in their cool dormitory. Beyond the jars of lobster bisque and canned truffle sauce, both Lancashires sat squat on their wood: Tasty and Mild like a pair of underground kings. No satisfaction in breaching the waxed cloth, breaking the stiff robes they were buried in. Only the owner had the right to draw the cutting wire twice through the horizontal before quartering. It was ritual, to bear each portion upstairs to the shop. Later we’d peel the cloth off the soft edge and unpuzzle the grain of the clotted blank face. Down there, too, was where they kept the unripe moons which were soft as what’s inside a baby’s unfused skull. In the dark they would salt to rock and start to spin. When at last the old satellite has worn to a nub, an uncut cheese will rise, white and purposeful with the sun’s reflected buttermilk light, to do its work. Think of the store of teeth a shark is born with; which, one by one, drift to the front of the mouth to take their turn to be the ones to shine, to bite.

Judy also appeared on the Mouthful of Air podcast to talk specifically about ‘The Larder’ with Mark McGuinness.

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