Wales

Posted on by

Patrick McGuinness

Patrick McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry is published by Carcanet and he has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003 and the Poetry Business Prize in 2006. He frequently writes and presents for radio, eg “A Short History of Stupidity” and “The Art of Laziness” for R3 and Night Waves and Women’s Hour on poetry, French culture and his own work as a poet and translator. His translation of Mallarme’s For Anatole’s Tomb, 2004 was the Poetry Book Society’s Translation Choice. His other books include studies of theatre, French culture and literature. Patrick is a frequent contributor to TLS, and TLRB and reads and speaks at literary festivals in UK , US, Canada , France , Czech Republic , Austria and Italy .

Books by Patrick McGuinness
The Last Hundred Days

Posted on by

‘Daniel’s Beetles’

Released 16th May 2011 by Tony Bianchi.

Daniel’s Beetles is the author’s translation of his prizewinning novel, Pryfeta

Daniel is six. One afternoon, while playing with insects in the garden, he sees his father fall to his death. Is he upset? It’s difficult to say, because Daniel would prefer to attend to his beetles. Forty years later, he remembers nothing of the event. But two failed relationships and his elderly mother’s confusion  bring Daniel face-to-face with his demons. Then he meets Cerys and Dr Bruno and discovers a bold new way of regaining control over the past.

Daniel’s Beetles is an absorbing, unnerving novel about memory and forgetting, stories and lies. It describes our attempts to recreate ourselves in ways we can never fully control. And in Dr Bruno, it offers a disturbing glimpse of how our fears and desires can be manipulated by much larger forces.

Tony Bianchi is from North Shields, Northumberland and lives in Cardiff. The Welsh-language version of Daniel’s Beetles won the Daniel Owen Prize in 2007 and was short-listed for Wales Book of the Year. He has published two other novels in Welsh – Esgyrn Bach (2006) and Chwilio am Sebastian Pierce (2009) – and a volume of short stories, Cyffesion Geordie Oddi Cartref (2010). His English-language novel, Bumping (2010), was long-listed for the Portico Prize in 2010. He has also won awards for his poetry in Welsh.

‘One of the most exciting writers working in Wales today.’ (Lloyd Jones, Taliesin)

‘This is an intricate and multi-layered novel, rich in ideas and eloquent in expression, which will be pored over for years to come.’ (Owain Wilkins, Planet)

‘The writing is muscular and at times utterly overwhelming… I was exhilarated.’
(Robat Arwyn, adjudicator, National Eisteddfod of Wales)

 

Posted on by

‘Real South Pembrokeshire’

The latest release in The Real Series.
Released 13th June 2011 by Tony Curtis.

Poet, and past resident and frequent visitor Tony Curtis roams south Pembrokeshire, from costal resorts of Tenby and Saundersfoot, west to the surfers of Stackpole and Barafundle and north to the Landsker, the cultural boundary between English speaking south Pembs and the Welsh speaking north. On his tour round half-county Curtis takes in many contrasts, from Pembrokshire’s famous new potatoes to the oil refineries of Angle, from farmworkers to immigrant artists, from the excited tourism of Folly Farm and Oakwood Park to the tranquillity of Bosherston Ponds and timeless beauty of Broadhaven beach.

In keeping with the series Curtis views his area through the eyes of a local and as a visitor, digging into his own Pembrokeshire backstory – and deeper into its history- but also observing keenly the Pembrokeshire of the new century. The mix of new and old, of memoir, anecdote and history gives us new insights into patters and the vivacity of life in one of the most beautiful places in Britain.

Posted on by

Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan where he introduced Creative Writing in 1981; he ran this discipline as both an undergraduate and post-graduate subject for nearly thirty years. He was born in Camarthen in 1946 and moved with his parents to Pembrokeshire in 1960. His grandmother’s family had farmed the county for generations and he had been visiting them through his childhood. He played rugby for Pembrokeshire Schoolboys and golf at Tenby before leaving for Swansea University. He and his family have taken over his mother’s house in Lydstep and they stay there frequently.
He has written and edited over thirty books, including The Poetry of Pembrokeshire and has won a number of literary prizes, including a Gregory Award, The Cholmondeley Award, the Dlyan Thomas Prize and the National Poetry Prize. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Society in 2001 and was awarded a D.Litt. from the University of Glamorgan in 2004. His nine collections of poetry all include poems based in Pembrokeshire which deal with its landscape, characters and history.

Books by Tony Curtis

Posted on by

‘Real Bloomsbury’

Published 15th November 2010 by Nicholas Murray.

“His (Murray) amiably informative and well-illustrated book is the ideal companion to any tour.” 
The Independent

Birthplace of Christian Socialism. Site of the British Museum, University College, RADA, the Friends House, the BMA, Great Ormond Street Hospital. Bloomsbury is crammed with history and with contemporary decision-making. But there is also working class Bloomsbury and, now, Bengali Bloomsbury in the east.

Biographer and novelist Nicholas Murray walks this crowded square mile or so, among the locals, the students, the tourists, alone or in the company of local characters, to give Bloomsbury the ‘Real’ series treatment of history, memoir, ‘psychogeography’ and oblique approaches to the familiar. His entertaining and informative text is accompanied by equally oblique images, the sort you won’t find in either tourist guides or regular history books. All of which present Bloomsbury as it’s never been portrayed before: intimate, contemporary, exploratory and occasionally downright strange.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch
www.bibliophilicblogger.blogspot.com

Posted on by

Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray is a biographer, poet, novelist and critic. The author of acclaimed biographies of Matthew Arnold, Andrew Marvell, Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka, he is also the Royal Literary Fund Writer for Queen Mary College University of London. Visit his website at www.nicholasmurray.co.uk

Books by Nicholas Murray
A Short Book About Love
Real Bloomsbury
Remembering Carmen


Posted on by

‘Real Llanelli’

Published 3rd December 2009 by Jon Gower.

Llanelli stands on several borders in Wales. Industrial town, or still belonging to its rural Carmarthenshire hinterland? Welsh or Englishspeaking? Plaid or Labour? Shaped by its workers or by the small number of families who employed them? It all makes Llanelli that much more interesting than a town of its size has any right to be.

Jon Gower has written a lively and engaging account of Llanelli and its environs, from how to pronounce ‘Llanelli’ to how a village in rural Carmarthenshire became a European centre for iron, steel and tinplate. He examines this industrial heritage but also its residue today, hitching a lift on the delivery of Llanelli-manufactured widgets to a manufacturer in Germany. He charts the industrial decline and transformation into leisure, particularly sport (Stradey or Parc y Scarlets?) beer and the environment. Then there’s the nearby cockling, farming inland and the leisure/ ecological development of the coastal path and park.

Shaped by and shaping all these things are the people: steelworkers, farmers, professional and amateur sportsmen, artists and writers, the small local bourgeoisie, the famous who may have left the town but still carry a part of it in them.The Llanelli identity may be complex but it is embraced by an almost tribal people.

Broadcaster, journalist and writer Jon Gower proves well- equipped to explore Llanelli and its culture in both languages in an entertaining book full of fresh insights and fascinating stories. From Burry Port to Trimsaran it’s all there.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

Posted on by

Jon Gower

Jon Gower is a producer with Boomerang, one of Wales’ most dynamically creative TV and radio companies. He was BBC Wales’ Arts and Media correspondent from 2000-2006, when he also presented First Hand, BBC Radio Wales’ arts programme. Jon has also worked, variously, as public affairs officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and as a current affairs journalist for HTV. He has written books about travel and local history, including An Island Called Smith (Gomer, 2001), about a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay, which was a John Morgan Award winner. He has edited a further four volumes, as well as writing a collection of short stories, Big Fish (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2000).

Jon is currently working on a critical biography of the American actor Steve Buscemi and has recently published a book about his home town, Llanelli, for Seren’s ‘Real Wales’ series. He is an English language judge for the 2011 Wales Book of the Year.

Books by Jon Gower
Real Llanelli

Posted on by

‘Real Cardiff Three’

Published 26th November 2009 by Peter Finch.

Since Peter Finch began his capital trilogy in 2002, Cardiff has changed enormously. In Real Cardiff Three Finch checks out the new, from Torchwood to St David’s 2, while continuing his authorial dig, revealing the places and people who make the city what it is.

En route he looks across Cardiff from its tallest buildings, seeks out subterranean passages, spends a day at Ely race course, storms Treoda Castle (if only he could find it), discovers the secret life of Whitchurch hospital and takes his geiger counter to atomic Cardiff. Full of pathos and comedy, nostalgia and blistering contemporary commentary, this volume is sure to become as popular as Real Cardiff and Real Cardiff Two.

‘Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch

Posted on by

‘Real Liverpool’

Published 1st January 2009 by Niall Griffiths.

In population terms, Liverpool isn’t a huge city (it is dwarfed by Birmingham), but it looms colossally in the history (recorded and mythical) of the British Isles, and indeed the world. Real Liverpoolis Niall Griffiths’ antidote to some of mawkish twaddle that has marked Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture. Griffiths’ love/hate relationship with the city of his birth is central to the book. He explores the various facets of the city – its maritime and merchant histories, class divisions, sectarian divides, Celtic influences, and the siege mentality underpinning the celebrated Scouse humour. Nor does he flinch from Liverpool’s dark side: the money from the slave trade, the drugs, the urban blight, the fallout from Thatcherism, the internecine violence. Jamie Bulger, Heysel, Hillsborough, the Dockers’ Strike, the Toxteth Riots, all of these and more are discussed.Real Liverpoolis underpinned by a strong autobiographical element which details the author’s birth and formative years in the city, his movement away from it, the abiding pull it exerts. In addition, Griffiths interviews many people connected closely to the city, from personal friends and family members to artists and workers. From the Wirral to Warrington, Anfield to Everton, Bootle to Diddyland, Griffiths criss-crosses Liverpool by the Ferry and through the Tunnels, from John Lennon airport to the racecourse and down the docks, building a picture of a city which, whatever its faults, is never dull.’Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch