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Parthian Head of Publishing Richard Davies shares some thoughts on his experience with diversity in publishing and in terms of audience demographics at literature festivals today, partly in response to a recent article by Kelly Keegan in the Wales Arts Review.

"I’m fifty one. I guess I’m middle-aged. You knock around a bit and it reaches you. I didn’t much like the look of the other option. Some friends didn’t make it. I’m also white, male and have been going to literature festivals in Cardiff for twenty-eight years. I was young, white and straight when I went to my first one. I had a degree by that point but I was working on a building site and delivering pizzas for a living.

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In addition, Keegan's article might be a way into reflecting on how difficult it is to reach audiences especially in literature."

Throughout the summer, we've seen Gary Raymond’s new suspense novel The Golden Orphans get a great reception from reviewers and readers alike. Jeff Noon of The Spectator called it “intense, unnerving and brilliant” while The Bookseller described it as “Shades of the Talented Mr. Ripley". The Golden Orphans is set in warm, dry Cyprus, but its story is chilling. The old painter Francis Benthem leads a secluded existence funded by his wealthy patron, the Russian gangster Illy Prostakov, whose recurring dream Benthem has to capture through his art. Bethem dies suddenly, and one fellow painter, our narrator, shows up to...

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

'A large part of this derives from how well crafted the characters are; Morais seems to understand that people are at their funniest when they least realise it...'  Bethan James takes a look at Joao Morais' 'accomplished, poignant and entertaining' debut short story collection, Things That Make the Heart Beat Faster for Wales Arts Review. Join us for the launch at the Roath Park pub on 11 October.  

It wasn’t so much an argument, more like a disagreement, with a guy who came up to me after a reading I did recently. I finished off on a poem about Multiple Sclerosis and how having it hasn’t changed me.

The guy didn’t say what his illness was but he went… “You are wrong. Of course being ill changes us. You are a different person now.”

I was diagnosed with MS in 2016 but I had been unwell for years and years before that. At one point I couldn’t feel the entire right half of my body and I was so tired all the time I just couldn’t do anything, even the things I enjoyed the most, like sex.

Back and fore the doctors’ surgery I went with my notebook of different symptoms – I must’ve looked like a right hypochondriac. I was sent to different specialists in different departments of the hospital until finally an MRI scan and a neurologist revealed all these scars on my brain and spinal cord. And then he went and put a name on all of those years of being ill: Multiple Sclerosis.

Cool.

So, did I walk into that neurologist’s office that afternoon as me, the person I had been for 28 years in all my glory and mischief, and was it like Stars in Their Eyes… did I suddenly walk out of that office into a puff of smoke and transform into a different person?

Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be... an emotional wreck.