Poetry RSS

In May 2020 we will be launching Christina Thatcher's second poetry collection, How to Carry Fire. Ahead of her new online course for the Poetry School, Christina has written a blog post about the burning down of her childhood home, and why, over 10 years later fire still fascinates her. Here's an extract: 'More than ten years on, I still think of our burning home. Every time I sit next to beach bonfires, roast marshmallows, shove kindling into a woodstove, I consider again what fire brings and takes away from us. As a writer, I am fascinated by how fire...

Congratulations to all the overall winners and shortlisted writers of the PENfro Festival Writing Awards. They will all be published in the inaugural Penfro Festival anthology Heartland, which will be launched on Saturday 12 October at PENfro Festival at lunchtime, with judges Rhiannon Hooson and Niall Griffiths present. We really hope to see you there! The overall winner of the Short Story Prize, Richard Owain Roberts, will be releasing his debut novel Hello Friend We Missed You through us in May 2020 and his debut short story collection All The Places We Lived is available from our online store. Richard won for his story...

In association with Ledbury Poetry Festival and with support from Arts Council England, we will be launching a new anthology of poetry in translation, Home on the Move: Two Poems go on a Journey as part of Ledbury Book Festival's Poetry Salon at Ledbury Books and Maps, Ledbury High Street, Ledbury from 7-9pm on 4 October  (the launch part of the event with an introduction to the book, readings and a Q&A will take place between 7 and 8pm). The evening will also include the ever popular Ledbury Open Mic! Tickets £5 on the door (includes a drink). For more info please see...

The writer and artist Brenda Chamberlain lived on the Greek islands during the 1960s. This week, the writer and traveller Brenda Squires visited Ydra and helped with Parthian’s international distribution by calling into the bookshop and newsagents on Odoz N. Votsi street just up from the harbour with a few copies of Brenda Chamberlain’s memoir of island life A Rope of Vines: A Journal from a Greek Island, first published in 1965, now republished in the Library of Wales series. Brenda Squires, also an artist, has been working on a series of paintings of contemporary island life in her journal of...

Our four poetry titles, released as a series in October 2018, have all been favourably reviewed by Gareth Leaman in the latest issue of Poetry Wales.  'The most emotively immediate of the four, Mari Ellis Dunning's Salacia brings to life a world in which Welsh women do not write their own stories, but rather have stories written upon them. We encounter rarely heard voices from the history and mythos of Wales and beyond, with an intense focus on the struggle of ensuring these voices ever reach an audience, achieved through an acute sense of the literal physical pressures of misogynistic...