Wales Book of the Year RSS

In the run up to the Wales Book of the Year winning announcement, Llenyddiaeth Cymru / Literature Wales are recording readings from the shortlisted authors.

Here's Sarah Broughton reading from Brando's Bride, whch has been shortlisted for the creative non-fiction category!

Winners will be announced on 31 July, so keep your fingers crossed for her!

You can watch the reading here.

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...

My daughter, Scout, is 13 years old on Sunday. And no one is more amazed than me that I managed to get her to this age physically, if not mentally, unscathed.

It’s not the thing to say, I know, but I'm going to say it anyway – I don’t always enjoy being a mother.

I didn't see the fun in changing nappies. Those first 3 years of not sleeping weren't the best years of my life, to be honest. And her tantrums around supermarkets made me want to put her in someone else’s trolley and hope they’d scan her with the rest of their shopping and take her home.

I hated making small talk in the playground with other mothers. I resented having to cut packed lunch sandwiches in a certain, special way or face World War 3.

I don't enjoy helping out with homework, attempting to solve maths equations that I had no chance of solving when I, myself, was in school, equations that I’ve got even less of a chance of solving now.

I dread parents’ evening, having to brush my hair and put on the only smart jacket I have and act all sensible. I don’t enjoy the constant drama, stress and worry that comes with a teenage girl.

But apart from all of that, being a mother is alright.

I’d like to think that, despite the list of things she could write that she has had to put up with because of me for the past 13 years, Scout thinks I’m alright, too.

I asked my favourite MILFS their opinions on being mothers.

Over and out. X

Congratulations to Lloyd Markham, Bad Ideas\Chemicals is one of six debut novels by writers under 35 shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize 2018, announced today. The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are presented for a first novel by a writer under 35. ​Past winners include Zadie Smith, David Szalay, Hari Kunzru and Sarah Waters. Total prize and award fund is £26,250. The Authors’ Awards, presented by Stephen Fry, will take place at RIBA on the evening of Thursday 19 July. The 2018 shortlist: Mussolini’s Island by Sarah Day (Tinder Press) All the Good Things by Clare Fisher (Viking) Strange Heart Beating by Eli...