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Books Without Borders Bookclub read The Women Who Blow on Knots
The following guest post is provided by Claire Houguez, former Parthian staff, who attended the Books Without Borders Bookclub event in London. I take the lift up to the fifteenth floor of Saint Georges Hotel. It’s apt that we’re meeting here because, as is gleefully noted by organiser Philip, a hotel of the same name is referenced in The Women Who Blow on Knots, the book we’re here to discuss. Philip is already seated at the reserved table when I arrive and he greets me with fresh coffee. We marvel at the scenic cityscape through the large windows. Philip started...
New Welsh Review Blog: Better Houses by Susie Wild
'Better Houses is about the places we inhabit in life, about relationships and the extraordinary in the everyday. It has all the key subjects: birth, death, sex, love and loss. At the book’s core, it is as much about moving house as it is about trying to centre yourself somewhere, to find a place to call home, to be still. I have moved at least every six months to two years in my adult life, sometimes through choice and often not. This draws on those experiences of packing and unpacking boxes, but it also employs fiction, humour and imagination. Other poems escape fires and great white sharks, test beds and language barriers and hunt fossils and comets, spells and adventures...'
Read the blog in full on the New Welsh Review website.
Buy Better Houses from the Parthian online shop for £8.99 and free P&P
New Welsh Review Blog: Table Talk by Nathan Munday
'I was in the south of France recently and visited the chateau at Pau where Henri IV was born. They supposedly used a tortoise shell as his cradle and the whole castle has become a memorial to that monarch who famously said: ‘Paris is worth a mass’, having renounced his Protestant faith for the French throne. We were on a guided tour, and to be honest, I was not that interested in the shell, the King, the gold frames and mirrors. What did draw my attention was… a big table. I think it was one of the biggest tables I had ever seen! Apparently, it could seat one hundred guests and I started imagining the noise, the food, and all the table talk that would have taken place around it...'
Monstering review Bad ideas\Chemicals: 'both disturbingly real and terribly sad.'
Alex Haagaard gives a deep reading of Bad Ideas\Chemicals in her review on monsteringmag.com:
'It is perhaps best characterised as a slightly magical-realist dystopian satire of 21st century British neoliberalism; for all its more fantastical elements, this is a story with a very strong sense of place and time. A unique desperation pervades everything in Goregree—clinging like a film of mildew to the town's arrogantly optimistic historical architecture, and smothered under a layer of cheerful bureaucratic indifference. This is a portrait of the Welsh valleys—after the closure of the mines, and under austerity.'
'[...] Bad Ideas\Chemicals is, at its heart, an account of what it is to be a freak. It portrays with painful honesty the many ways that society lets freaks know we're not welcome here.'
'[...] both disturbingly real and terribly sad.'
Buy Bad ideas\Chemicals from our online shop for £7.99 and free P&P
Pigeon and The Tradition Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2017
Congratulations to Alys Conran (Pigeon) and Peter Lord (The Tradition) who have both had their latest books shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2017, as announced on BBC Radio Wales this morning.
The Wales Book of the Year Award, administered by Literature Wales, is presented to the best Welsh-language and English-language works first published in the preceding year in the fields of creative writing and literary criticism in three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction.
The English-language poetry category, sponsored by The Brecknock Society is entitled The Roland Mathias Poetry Award. The English-language fiction category is sponsored by The Rhys Davies Trust, and is entitled The Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award. The English-language judging panel this year are: award-winning author Tyler Keevil; Senior Lecturer Dimitra Fimi and the Costa Poetry Prize winner Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathan Edwards said: 'This shortlist offers a real celebration of just how exciting, vibrant and diverse literature in Wales currently is. There are books here for everyone: poetry collections which are novelistic in their scope and ambition, novels whose innovations in language might be traditionally expected of poetry. There are biographies which don't so much show you a life as let you amble round in a world, reference books which can put six centuries on your coffee table. To be part of the announcement of this list is to be proud to be Welsh; the country which moved these writers to such astonishing achievement.'
Lleucu Siencyn, Chief Executive of Literature Wales said: 'It’s one of the literary highlights of the year, and we at Literature Wales have been filled with excitement for the release of this year's Short List. With the announcement taking place during Libraries Week, we hope that readers will head to their local library to seek out these wonderful titles to enjoy the wealth and variety of modern Welsh literature. Readers will travel from the shadow of slate mountains to 60s London; they’ll be lost at sea; they’ll experience the pain of radiation therapy; will learn about the history of Welsh art, and journey through themes of loss, myth and memory.'
The winners of this prestigious award will be announced at an Award Ceremony held in The Tramshed, Cardiff on the evening of Monday 13 November, where a total prize fund of £12,000 is up for grabs. Each category winner will receive a prize of £1,000, and the main award winners in each language will receive an additional £3,000. Each winner will also receive a specially commissioned trophy created by the artist Angharad Pearce Jones. Tickets for the Award Ceremony are £6 and can be purchased online from http://tramshedcardiff.com.
At the Award Ceremony both the People’s Choice Award and Gwobr Barn y Bobl (the Welsh-language people’s prize) will also be presented to the reading public’s favorite title from the Short List. Visit Wales Arts Review to vote for your favorite English-language title.
