Reviews RSS

A new edition of Dat’s Love has been published by Parthian’s Library of Wales series. Leonora Brito’s influential and award-winning collection of short stories was originally published in 1999. Yalan Bao reinvigorates Leonora’s stories and characters, reviving them for a new generation of readers. Leonora Brito was raised in and influenced by the multicultural community of Tiger Bay, she recreates the society’s values through a diverse collection of voices. Afro- Caribbean, Leonora writes about the diaspora felt by the Black-Welsh community. She has a vibrant writing style, inflected by humorous observations that highlight the oppression, persecution and daily life of...

'Dat’s Love creates an enduring impression of a contemporary Welsh literary giant in-the-making. Through her extant body of short stories, we can only begin to acknowledge the loss of a prodigious literary artist with a breathtaking imagination who was only just warming up. Her depictions of the bustling and multicultural Tiger Bay and Cardiff, and its inhabitants – especially the African diaspora community – are invaluable. Each reading of the collection reveals something new and continues to leave the reader stunned at the nimble skill of Brito’s writing – that deservedly won her the Rhys Davies Short Story Award in...

 Award-winning author Tristan Hughes' most recent novel Hummingbird has been making the review rounds - here are some of the highlights:   'lean, lyrical...beautifully nuanced and utterly touching' -- Claire Allfree (Daily Mail), full review.   'Hummingbird is a triumph of compression, almost occupying a place somewhere between a novella and a more fully-blown novel. The narrative control and sense of scale it takes to make everything neither too long nor too short inform its structure...its evocation of eternity, the ever-deferred destination of the ever-changing, just perfect...this novel has scarcely any faults' -- Nigel Jarrett (Wales Arts Review), full review.  ...

  “With its large format and over four hundred coloured illustrations, this book is as big as a flagstone, but there’s nothing heavy about it.” That is how Prys Morgan describes The Tradition: a new history of Welsh art. The author, Peter Lord, has dedicated many decades to write books in order to prove that the Welsh have a tradition of appreciating fine arts and to disprove those who deny the concept of Welsh Art. Prior to his latest publication, Peter Lord has published three volumes of a collection called The Visual Culture of Wales. In The Journal of Glamorgan...

'Moonlight washes across the entire, exposed landscape of this poetry collection. The ‘white eye’ orbits from the first page to the last, with a quiet, ancient glint amid the frail unfolding of melancholy lives. Swansea-born writer Natalie Ann Holborow levels the lunar gaze onto a sudden first kiss, violence at a party, memories of past love, wretchedly drunken taxi rides, and a bundle of other tender, inflamed moments. Each is conjured in imagery that aches.'

'And Suddenly You Find Yourself is somehow both meticulous and raw, as if Holborow has mulled infinitely on how best to describe the act of stripping us to our simplest selves.

[...]

'Shoot for the moon? Holborow has landed, roamed its face, dipped into the craters, and gathered an armful of stars while up there.'

Sophie Baggott reviews Natalie Ann Holborow's debut poetry collection And Suddenly You Find Yourself for Wales Arts Review.