Wales Book of the Year

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Friday Poem – ‘Sun, Earth and Moon scale model (Oxford Natural History Museum)’ by Glyn Edwards

View of the sun and moon seen over the curvature of the earth

To celebrate In Orbit by Glyn Edwards making the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2024, this week’s Friday Poem is Glyn’s poem ‘Sun, Earth and Moon scale model (Oxford Natural History Museum)’.

Sun, Earth and Moon scale model (Oxford Natural History Museum) To stand together by the gallery pillars looking down at Anning’s ichthyosaur, at a triceratops skull. To imagine the air as a dense strata filled with fossils. To notice then two pinheads in a display case and an explanation of scale beyond comprehension. To hear you count all nine zeros and read aloud that there is a third sphere across the hall the equivalent size and distance of the sun. To see how you first flinch then stare at the gilded ball and to know what you will ask next. To tell you there’s one billion seconds in a decade and to watch you translate our lives into time, and to watch you transpose time into distance, and to watch you lean so close to the glass that your head eclipses the painted earth, and its tiny, textured moon, and to watch you.

Voting is currently open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award where you can support your favourite book on the shortlist. Don’t forget to vote if you haven’t already done so.

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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.

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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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Paul Henry wins the English Language Poetry Category at Wales Book of the Year 2023

Left: Paul Henry. Right: Image of the cover of As If To Sing

Congratulations to Paul Henry who won the English Language Poetry Category at Wales Book of the Year 2023 for his collection As If To Sing.

As If To Sing is Paul Henry’s eleventh collection. The power of song to sustain the human spirit resonates through the collection, which is rich in the musical lyricism admired by Paul’s readers and fellow poets. An essential addition to his compelling body of work, it is a deserved winner of this year’s Poetry Category award.

Wales Book of the Year is run by Literature Wales, and celebrates outstanding literary talent from Wales across many genres and in both English and Welsh. There are 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. This year the overall award went to Caryl Lewis for her novel Drift.

You can view the full list of winners from all categories in both language on the Literature Wales website.

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Friday Poem – ‘Cei Newydd’ by Paul Henry

Photo of a small wooden rowing boat drifting along in blue-grey waters.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Cei Newydd’ by Paul Henry from his Wales Book of the Year shortlisted collection As If To Sing.

Cei Newydd We drifted out one afternoon on a dinghy’s water-bed, woke to no sight of the shore. We had not been born. A panic of oars scratched the wilderness and the harbour came back to us, our mothers on the pier. The salt on the fishing nets tasted the same. Soon, Brown Helen, we shall drift out again.

Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Vote for your favourite book on this year’s shortlist via the Wales Arts Review website.

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Click below or scan the QR code to preview the first 15 pages of As If To Sing

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Two Seren authors shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023

Seren authors Sophie Buchaillard and Paul Henry have both been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023.

The shortlists were announced on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday 21st May. Sophie Buchaillard’s debut novel This is Not Who We Are is shortlisted for The Rhys Davies’ Trust Fiction Award. Meanwhile Paul Henry is shortlisted for The Poetry Award with his collection As If To Sing, the second time he has been shortlisted.

This year’s judges include Emily Burnett, Emma Smith-Barton, Kristian Evans and Mike Parker. Following the announcement, Mike Parker said “…the standard of this year’s Wales Book of the Year shortlist is extraordinarily high.  To arrive at it, we had to lose wonderful books in every single category – it was a very hard-fought battle, and a supremely intense discussion.  Picking the winners will be an even tougher challenge!”

This cover shows an image of an African tree silhouetted against the purple, mist shrouded dawn sky. The text reads: This Is Not Who We Are. Sophie Buchaillard.
This cover shows an abstract painting by the artist Antony Goble. A woman with blue skin dominates the image in a vibrant orange dress. She is balancing an urn on her head and holds a red crow in her hand. The text reads: As If To Sing, Paul Henry.

Wales Book of the Year is an annual prize run by Literature Wales, which celebrates outstanding literary talent from Wales across many genres and in both English and Welsh. There are 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 2023.

Literature Wales Executive Director Clare Furlong said, “It is a pleasure to co-celebrate Welsh Literature with writers, publishers, readers, and the whole literary sector… I encourage you all to go ahead and read the shortlist, and wherever you are – at the library, the office, or at the school gate – discuss, celebrate, and encourage others to do the same.”

The category winners and overall Wales Book of the Year 2023 will be announced in a ceremony at the Tramshed in Cardiff on Thursday 13th July 2023. Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award via the Wales Arts Review website, where you can vote for your favourite title on any of this year’s shortlists.

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You can view the full shortlists for all categories on the Literature Wales website.

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Friday Poem – ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile which has just been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year!

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Iraqi Bride in Transit She’s nineteen, waits in Charles de Gaulle airport unsure where to go. She hopes that Groom comes for her soon. Her first experience of a plane journey hasn’t been Oh là là. Far from her Baghdad home, her white suit is not so white now. It’s the first time she wears high heels; she has blisters, struggles to balance. She wears her mother’s fur coat, a white headscarf, white clutch bag holds her green passport. Feels bare without her abaya. Groom waits in Heathrow arrivals. It’s 23rd December 1974. Three flights have arrived from Paris in the last eight hours. No sign of her. Iraqi Christians who boarded the same plane from Baghdad waiting for their New York flight recognise she’s the bride, take her to the gate. Last flight before Christmas. He is pupil. He do drugs. She rolls her Rs. Groom’s lost hope. It’s late. He gets up, ready to leave Heathrow, gathers coins to make the international call. What will he tell her father? Announcement. Groom is summoned to Immigration. Your wife says you do drugs. He realises at that moment he should have taught his bride the correct English term for pharmacy student.

Inhale/Exile is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Head to the Wales Arts Review website to vote for your favorite www.walesartsreview.org.

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Friday Poem – ‘Bowerbirds’ by Deryn Rees-Jones

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Bowerbirds’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her collection Erato which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year.

This cover shows a blurred black and white image of someone dancing.

Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato’s themes are manifold but particularly focus on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm.

Bowerbirds Start now with the smallest things, a pile of blackened acorns, glinting beetle wings, the green fruit and purple flowers of the potato bush. He trails a path of halts and hesitations like stations of the cross, turns colour in his mind, perspective. Snail shells or the blue of berries? (Is that a bud of jasmine in his beak?) His bower, I see, is thatched with orchid stems, moss laid like a lawn at the entrance to his bivouac, orange leaves like a pool of restless koi. This stuff he collects as a small boy might, adrift on a prayer of football cards and dinosaurs. All settles as he eyes her. And here now, like a seal on his heart, a bed of blooms pulled from a bush. How carefully he’s considered her. This pink, he thinks, of roses.

Erato is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Looking for Christmas gift inspiration? Browse our Christmas Gift Guide for literary ideas for the whole family.

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Friday Poem – ‘Beachcombing’ by Tiffany Atkinson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Beachcombing’ by Tiffany Atkinson from the anthology A Last Respect. Don’t forget to tune into the BBC Radio Wales Arts Show tonight to hear the announcement of the Wales Book of the Year 2021 English-language winners.

A Last Respect is a selection of contemporary Welsh poetry by winners of the Roland Mathias Prize. The poems included are wide ranging in style and subject. They contemplate relationships, nature, the environment, mortality, time, art and politics, and take place in a range of locations, from Aberystwyth to Baghdad, from war-torn landscapes to parents’ evenings. Featuring Dannie Abse, Tiffany Atkinson, Ruth Bidgood, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Christine Evans, John Freeman, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Robert Minhinnick, and Owen Sheers, it is a must-have anthology of poetry from Wales.

Beachcombing Children will enter the water hands first. There’s a knack that women all over the world have of putting up hair in a knot, the pale nape gathers the salt. The babushka and the magpie own the beach but no one cares. Her fingers strum the muscles in her thighs. She’s a mountain but her fingertips are diamonds. This patisserie of crotches in their little wraps; how tenderly we don’t look. Airport novels crackle in the sand. Even the baby’s too dazzled to cry; his fat hands bounce on the breeze. I have spent a half-life on the wrong strand. Here’s the barman’s daughter selling frappé. I would like a bitter chinking glassful emptied on my head. I would like to drink the sea. I’d like every tiny house of sand to wear me down. When the small brown woman comes to snap the last umbrellas shut, she’ll tut and sweep the bones.

A Last Respect is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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The Amazingly Astonishing Story by Lucy Gannon is on the Creative Non-Fiction shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2021. Buy your copy here.

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Friday Poem – ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans from our new anthology A Last Respect.

The cover of A Last Respect shows a painting of rolling green fields beneath a blue sky. In the distance, a lake is visible at the bottom of the valley.

A Last Respect is a selection of contemporary Welsh poetry by winners of the Roland Mathias Prize. The poems included are wide ranging in style and subject. They contemplate relationships, nature, the environment, mortality, time, art and politics, and take place in a range of locations, from Aberystwyth to Baghdad, from war-torn landscapes to parents’ evenings. Two accompanying essays provide the context in which the poets work. In her Introduction, Jane Aaron writes about Roland Mathias: a poet himself, but also an influential editor and cultural commentator who did much to foster and develop poetry in Wales. A Last Respect is a continuation of his legacy. Daniel G. Williams’ Afterword is an incisive discussion about poetry in Wales over the past sixty years: where it started from and how it changed. A must-have anthology of poetry from Wales.

Featuring Dannie Abse, Tiffany Atkinson, Ruth Bidgood, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Christine Evans, John Freeman, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Robert Minhinnick, and Owen Sheers.

Unseen Island. From accross the sleeping Sound the unseen island nudges at my consciousness – wind-blown Enlli; nowhere more steeped in calm, more resonant of growing. There, air trembles with associations and I am played to a tune I scarcely recognise easy as water, but earthed. Is it energy or faith that breeds content in me? Washed smooth, drawn out, moulded to acceptance like clay on a wheel, so like a compass I am pointing always where you lie – elusive, shimmering – but no mirage: my unblurring.

A Last Respect is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Secret Reverse’ by Zoë Skoulding

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Secret Reverse’ by Zoë Skoulding from her collection Footnotes to Water which recently won the poetry category in Wales Book of the Year 2020.

In Footnotes to Water Zoë Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bièvre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring different senses of community, and the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.

 

Footnotes to Water is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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