Literary Salon Series

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

As part of the Literary Salon Series, Ray Cluley will be in conversation with Dr Alan Bilton, author and Senior Lecturer of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University.

"There's a tiny gap between the stories we tell ourselves and those we tell others and that's where you'll find the truth."

All That's Lost is the second collection from award-winning horror writer Ray Cluley, bringing together 17 stories exploring the haunted, the strange, and the uncanny.

Lose yourself in the darkness here, and find yourself changed...

"Without doubt the best that horror can give you" (Stephen Volk)

About the Author

Ray Cluley’s work has appeared in a various magazines and anthologies and has been reprinted several times, including in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Yearseries, Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and in Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres series. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, and Chinese. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story (‘Shark! Shark!’) and has since been nominated for Best Novella (Water For Drowning) and Best Collection (Probably Monsters). His second collection, All That’s Lost, will be available in May 2022. 

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

How does it feel to live on the edge of your own life? Cassie discovers she can fly but has no-one to tell. Christine has been in her friend’s shadow for far too long, Bernard loses his job through no fault of his own and, in the title story, Hannah struggles with the pressure of her father waiting for her to sort his life out.

Ranging from teenage experiences in the 1960’s to an older woman looking back on her life and reflecting on chances not taken and opportunities missed, this deeply moving short story collection is inhabited by a rich cast of characters who feel as if they never quite belong, outsiders looking on as their lives subtly unravel around them. Combining pathos, humour and wisdom, these twelve stories explore how the ordinary can be strange, the mundane heartbreaking and the tragic, comic.

‘At last a storyteller who gets us, gets our lives and weaves her stories with breathtaking truth. The random, strange events that upend us, the fears that hold us back, the humanity that brings us together and how we find the courage to be ourselves. An outrageous, funny and triumphant collection.’ - Geraldine Taylor MA Bristol University, Multi-award winning children’s author

About the author
Born in Cardiff, Carolyn’s work has appeared in previous Honno anthologies. Her first novel, Missing Nancy was published by Accent Press in 2008. She gained an MPhil in Writing at Glamorgan University (now the University of South Wales). Her stories have won national and local prizes and have appeared in The New Welsh Review, Mslexia and Route Magazine amongst others. She’s worked as a creative writing tutor for many years and two text books have been published based on her teaching methods. Currently she’s taking a PhD at Swansea University for which she’s writing a new novel.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

As part of the Literary Salon series, The Cultural Institute and Culture Matters invite you to the launch of Land of Change: Stories of Struggle and Solidarity from Wales. Edited by Gemma June Howell, Land of Change is a colourful anthology of bold artworks and documentary photography as well as insightful, enlightening and poignant creative pieces, speeches, journalism and memoir. It is a celebration of the diverse collectanea of underrepresented and working-class voices from Wales.

Panel members include anthology contributors, Kate Cleaver, Rhoda Thomas and Rhys Trimble, Gemma June Howell, Associate Editor at Culture Matters and Daniel G. Williams, Professor of English Literature and Co-Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University.

Kate Cleaver

Kate is an Anglo-Indian writer studying for a PhD with Swansea University. She is researching the lives of ordinary people who found themselves incarcerated in the Briton Ferry Insane Asylum, Vernon House. She is creating stories and has found that linking her stories to historical fact is a way to bring people from the past to life. In 2019 she was longlisted for the New Welsh Writers’ Award and has had a memoir published by Parthian in Just So You Know, and another in Painting the Beauty Queens Orange: Women’s Lives in the 1970s (Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 2021).

Rhys Trimble

Rhys is a neurodiverse, bilingual poet, teacher, translator, performer, critic, musician, sound artist, visual artist, shaman, pastynwr, performance artist, publisher, editor and activist who provided a speech at the Banthebill protest in Bangor. Born in Zambia, raised in South Wales and resident in North Wales, he is the author of 20 or so books.

Rhoda Thomas

Originally from London, Rhoda has been settled in Wales for 40 years, contributing to the training of social workers, counsellors and doctors as a psychologist and sociologist. She has held office in student and trade unions, and with Tim Evans, she convenes the annual Llanelli 1911 Railway Strike Commemoration Festival. She is a founding member of the Live Poets Society, which brings together poets from across south Wales for workshops and open-mic events. A member of the Socialist Workers Party, she gives talks and writes on subjects such as the lives of female revolutionaries and the damage to our health from the food industry. She reads regularly at poetry groups and events. She is the author of Survive and grow in difficult times, and her poetry can be found in recent anthologies, in Red Poets, and in her poetry collections. In this prose-piece she writes about the challenges she has faced in life as a working-class woman, and the value of solidarity.

Gemma June Howell (Editor)

Gemma is a grass-roots activist, writer, poet, tutor, academic, Associate Editor for Culture Matters and regular contributor to Nation Cymru. Co-founder of the CSOS, she co-organised the Sister March (Cardiff, 2017). Previously published in Onward/Ymlaen! and with the Red Poets, she performs annually at the Merthyr Rising Festival. Her work has appeared in Bloodaxe Books (2015), The London Magazine (2020) and Tongue & Talk, (Made in Manchester, for BBC Radio 4, 2021). Gemma has recently submitted her PhD: an emancipatory project exploring collective trauma, and transcendence. Entitled Concrete Diamonds, it’s a hybrid novel, featuring an interwoven, eco-feminist mythopoeic tale, punctuated with graffiti, punk-style concrete poetry. Essentially a polyphonic homage to working-class people living in post-industrial Britain, the work captures the life worlds of five generations and encompasses a range of literary styles: from steam-of-consciousness to polemic, melodic and poetic, gritty realist and dark comedic. Underpinned with critical theory, the novel illuminates the past origins and present conditions of poverty, discrimination, and subjugation of underrepresented and marginalised people. 

Daniel G. Williams 

Daniel is Professor of English Literature and Co-Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University. He is also Co-director with Kirsti Bohata of CREW – the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Langauge of Wales. He has edited several books and is the author of Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (2006), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales (2012) and Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015). 2021 saw the publication of a new edition of his collection of Raymond Williams’s writings, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity. It first appeared in 2003 and the new expanded edition marked the Centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth.

*Please note this is an online event* 

New research suggests that Welsh literary tastes - even in English - differ from those of the rest of the UK. How do Welsh readers see the world differently? What roles do local reading and writing communities play in this?  

As part of the AHRC-funded Big Book Review project, join authors Cynan Jones and Manon Steffan Ros in conversation with Professor Kirsti Bohata and Dr Richard Robinson (Prifysgol Abertawe/Swansea University) and Dr Aidan Byrne (Prifysgol Wolverhampton University) as they discuss the relationship between story and place, the importance of Welsh writing and Welsh literary identity. 

Aidan will also reveal findings about Welsh reading habits indicated by our work with the BBC's Novels That Shaped Our World, and invite you to take part in our research to tell us what really makes a good book.

Cynan Jones is an acclaimed fiction writer from Wales. His work has appeared in over twenty countries, and in journals and magazines including Granta and The New Yorker. He is the winner of a number of awards including the BBC National Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Prize, and has also written for television and radio. 

Manon Steffan Ros is an author and scriptwriter. She has written more than 40 books and has been awarded prizes including Wales Book of the Year and the Tir Na N’Og prize for children’s literature. Her novel, Llyfr Glas Nebo, has been translated into eight languages. She lives in Meirionnydd with her sons. 

Professor Kirsti Bohata is a leading scholar in the field of Welsh writing in English, and has published on postcolonial theory, queer literature, disability studies and literary geography from the late nineteenth-century to the present. Her most recent books are Queer Square Mile, an anthology of queer short stories from Wales (Parthian, 2022) and Disability in Industrial Britain (Manchester University Press, 2020) which is fully open access. She is Co-Director of CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) and the multidisciplinary Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University and co-Chair of the Association for Welsh Writing in English. 

Dr Richard Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Media and Language. He works in twentieth-century and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in modernism and its afterlife, style, Irish writing, and literary representations of central Europe. He is the author of two monographs, Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007) and John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published on writers such as John McGahern, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Elena Ferrante, Rebecca West, Ian McEwan and Edward St Aubyn. 

Dr Aidan Byrne is senior lecturer in English Literatures at Wolverhampton University. His research includes Welsh literatures, politicians’ fiction and popular culture. He is currently co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Novel Perceptions digital humanities project exploring canonical anxieties, literary tastes and popular ideas about literary quality. He is secretary of the Association for Welsh Writing in English / Cymdeithas Llen Saesneg Cymru and can be found @plashingvole.

In this special online event, Dr Rachel Farebrother and Dr Miriam Thaggert discuss co-editing A History of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 (CUP, 2022)

The Cambridge History of the Harlem Renaissance presents new essays that explore the unprecedented flowering of African American cultural expression in the 1920s and 1930s that is now known as the Harlem Renaissance. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman to dance and book illustrations – the volume seeks to at once encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It takes stock of nearly a hundred years of “Harlem Renaissance studies” and considers what the future augurs for the study of “the New Negro.”

African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 presents original essays that map ideological, historical, and cultural shifts in the 1920s. Complicating the familiar reading of the 1920s as a decade that began with a spectacular boom and ended with disillusionment and bust, the collection explores the range and diversity of Black cultural production. Emphasizing a generative contrast between the ephemeral qualities of periodicals, clothes, and décor and the relative fixity of canonical texts, the volume captures in its dynamics a cultural movement that was fluid and expansive.

Miriam Thaggert is Associate Professor of African American Literature at SUNY-Buffalo. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). With Rachel Farebrother, she is co-editor of A History of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 (CUP, 2022).  Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Feminist Modernist Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and the edited volume New Modernist Studies. Her new monograph, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois) will be published in June, 2022.  

Rachel Farebrother is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University. She is the author of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (Ashgate, 2009). Her essays have appeared in Comparative American Studies, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, Modernism/modernity, and various edited collections. With Miriam Thaggert (SUNY-Buffalo), she has co-edited The History of the Harlem Renaissance (CUP, 2021) and African American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930 (CUP, 2022).

*In association with the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales*
Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

Richard King will be in conversation with Kirsti Bohata, Professor of English Literature and Director of CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) at Swansea University.

A landmark history of the people of Wales during a period of great national change.

In the closing third of the twentieth century, Wales experienced the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation, the subsequent loss of employment and community cohesion, and the struggle for its language and identity. These changes were largely forced upon the country, whose own voice, rarely agreed upon within its borders, had to fight to be heard outside of Wales.

Brittle with Relics is a history of the people of Wales undergoing some of the country's most seismic and traumatic events: the disasters of Aberfan and Tryweryn; the rise of the Welsh language movement; the Miners' Strike and its aftermath; and the narrow vote in favour of partial devolution.

Featuring the voices of Neil Kinnock, Rowan Williams, Leanne Wood, Gruff Rhys, Michael Sheen, Nicky Wire, Sian James, Welsh language activists, members of former mining communities and many more, this is a vital history of a nation determined to survive, while maintaining the hope that Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.

About the author
Richard King is the author of Original Rockers (shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and a Rough Trade, The Times and Uncut Book of the Year), How Soon Is Now? (the Sunday Times Music Book of the Year) and The Lark Ascending (a Rough Trade, Mojo and Evening Standard Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Prize), all published by Faber & Faber. He was born into a bilingual family in South Wales and for the last twenty years has lived in the rural county of Powys, in mid-Wales.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

As part of the Literary Salon Series, Ellie Rees will be in conversation with Dr Alan Bilton, author and Senior Lecturer of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University.

The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classified as nature writing, though the term, deep mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides, and ruins as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of the Welsh coastline. However, the mapping in Ticking is not only confined to the tangible or material, it includes the intangible, the dreams and hopes, imaginations and fears of its residents both in the past and the present.

About the author
After retiring as a teacher in 2009, Ellie realised that there was more to life than gardening and so decided to become a student once more. She gained an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University, and her work is now widely published. She writes memoir, creative-non-fiction and essays but her main love is poetry. Ellie’s poems have been published in such places as The New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, The Lonely Crowd, Black Bough Poems, The Cabinet of Heed, Trestle Ties and The Broken Spine. She has been shortlisted in several prestigious competitions and in 2020 won the Selected or Neglected Competition run by The Hedgehog Press. Ellie’s first poetry collection titled Ticking was published on January 14th 2022 by The Hedgehog Press.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

The '70s wasn’t all glam rock and flares, punk and pogo-ing… In Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, the women who lived the decade reveal what it meant to push boundaries, claim your identity, and carve out your place amidst the winter of discontent, the scorching summer of ‘76 and the rise of Thatcherism. One young woman says a forced goodbye to her newborn baby. Another grasps new opportunities and sets sail on a LGP Tanker with a crew of men. A third asserts her sexual identity. A fourth sets up a kitchen table business that launches an international brand. These stories of ambition and adventure, motherhood and marriage, are by turns heart-breaking, humorous, and honest.

Contributors Carolyn Lewis ‘The Sound of Water’ and Kate Cleaver ‘Firsts’, along with the book’s editor, Rebecca F. John, were in conversation with Dr Alan Bilton, author and Senior Lecturer of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University.

Kate Cleaver

Kate Cleaver is an Anglo-Indian writer studying for a PhD with Swansea University. She is researching the lives of ordinary people who found themselves incarcerated in the Briton Ferry Insane Asylum, Vernon House. She has begun to create stories and has found that linking her stories to historical fact is a way to bring people from the past to life; she is asking if those ghosts can be recreated into stories, into creative history. In 2019 she was long listed in the New Welsh Writers Award and has just had a memoir published by Parthian in ‘Just So You Know’.

Carolyn Lewis

Born in Cardiff, Carolyn’s work has appeared in previous Honno anthologies. Her first novel, Missing Nancy was published by Accent Press in 2008. She gained an MPhil in Writing at Glamorgan University (now the University of South Wales). Her stories have won national and local prizes and have appeared in The New Welsh Review, Mslexia and Route Magazine amongst others. She’s worked as a creative writing tutor for many years and two text books have been published based on her teaching methods. Currently she’s taking a PhD at Swansea University for which she’s writing a new novel.

Rebecca F. John

Rebecca F. John was born in 1986, and grew up in Pwll, a small village on the south Wales coast. She holds a BA in English with Creative Writing and an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University, as well as a PGCE PCET from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4Extra. In 2015, her short story ‘The Glove Maker's Numbers’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. She is the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award 2015. Her first short story collection, Clown's Shoes, was published through Parthian in 2015. Her first novel, The Haunting of Henry Twist, was published through Serpent's Tail in July 2017. It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. In 2022, she will publish her first children's book with Firefly Press, as well as a second adult novel, The Empty Greatcoat, and a short novel, Fannie, with Honno Press.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

Poets Patrick Jones and Susie Wild read from their latest collections ‘Fuse/Fracture (Poems 2001-2021)' and ‘Windfalls’

Patrick Jones is author of six plays, three spoken word albums, nine books of poetry and lyricist on the Even in Exile album (James Dean Bradfield). He is currently Writer in Residence with The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Wales and adapting his 2016 play, Before I Leave, into a film. He was born in Tredegar, Wales. His latest book is a special 20th anniversary edition Fuse/Fracture (Poems 2001-2021). He has four children and two cats and lives at the foot of a mountain. 
patrick-jones.info
twitter: @heretic101 

FUSE / FRACTURE (POEMS 2001-2021):
A 20th anniversary edition with a foreword by James Dean Bradfield. These are elegies, protest songs and battle cries as Jones speaks to and for the disaffected, bearing witness to contemporary and political concerns. 28 new poems also turn their gaze to the personal; haunted by ghosts of both the living and the dead. An inventory of scars where love once lived. 
 

Susie Wild is author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. Her work has recently featured in Poetry Wales, Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project Write Where We Are Now, The Atlanta Review and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is also Publishing Editor at Parthian Books specialising in poetry and fiction. She currently lives in a garret on a leafy avenue in Cardiff.
http://susiewild.blogspot.com
twitter: @Soozerama

WINDFALLS:
In Windfalls, Wild writes of fruit blown down by the wind, of unexpected and unearned gains which renew the beauty and joy of life. These are also stories of heroines who fall or jump from pedestals, taking risks in a world that is often dangerous for women, but refusing to settle for the conventional. Wild continues to bring us her refreshingly slant world view, whether unpicking the domestic, the political or the environmental.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Park Campus, Swansea University

Dusking Through Waves is an eclectic mix of short stories written over several years. From the mountains and parks of Wales to the scrub lands of Africa; from Dylan Thomas' Wales to Lawrence Durrell's Corfu, some have been placed in competitions and published in reputable literary journals, others have been adapted into stage plays and performed by a professional theatre company. The stories deal with subjects such as domestic violence, loneliness, dementia, war and famine, and love.

About the Author
Wendy Holborow was born and now lives back in South Wales, UK, but lived in Greece for fourteen years, where she founded and co-edited Poetry Greece. She has won prizes for her short stories, notably the Philip Good Memorial Prize, The Aber Valley Competition, The Island Magazine and most recently a first prize in the Allen Rayne competition. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals. She has completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has had ten poetry collections published, two children’s novels and a short story collection, Dusking Through Waves. She has also had several plays performed professionally.

Taliesin Create, Singleton Campus, Swansea University

In this collection of thrilling short stories, Rachael Llewellyn adeptly traverses the outer edges of human experience and the horror that often comes with it. Twisting between the disturbing, the humorous, and the heartbreaking, Human Beings will forever change the way you look at your neighbour, how you treat your coworker, and even make you second guess the person lying next to you in bed. Because real monsters aren't what you see on late night television . . . the real monsters live just around the corner.

About the Author
Rachael Llewellyn is a novelist living in Wales. Her work includes The Red Creek series, Down Red Creek and Impulse Control (Sulis International Press, 2019/2020), and Human Beings (Bear Hills Books, 2021), a collection of short stories. Her fiction has been featured in numerous magazines and journals including The Heartland Society of Women Writers, The Spectre Review, and Crow & Cross Keys, as well as anthologies including Creating In Crisis (Polari Press, 2021), Twisted Love (Jazz House Publications, 2021), and The Speculative Book 2021 (Speculative Books, 2021). She is currently completing a PhD in memory, trauma, and folklore at Swansea University.

In this special online event, five critically-acclaimed women authors from Wales and Europe discussed and read from their work. Rebecca F John, Caryl Lewis and Efa Lois (Wales) came together with Nora Ikstena (Latvia) and Alena Mornštajnová (Czech Republic) to explore approaches to fictionalising history and writing family, community and place. 

Chaired by Dr Kathryn Jones

The Panelists:

Nora Ikstena is one of the most visible and influential prose writers in Latvia. After obtaining a degree in Philology from the University of Latvia in 1992, she went on to study English literature at Columbia University. In her prose, Nora Ikstena often reflects on life, love, death and faith. Soviet Milk(2015, shortlisted for the Annual Literature Award for best prose and translated into numerous languages including Japanese, German, Croatian, English, Hungarian, Italian and Russian), Besa (2012), Celebration of Life (1998, translated into Norwegian, Italian, Danish, Swedish), and The Virgin's Lesson (2001) are some of her most widely appreciated novels. The novel Amour Fou has been adapted for theatre and published in Russian (2010). Ikstena is also a prolific author of biographical fiction, non-fiction, scripts, essays and collections of short prose. She is an active participant in Latvia's cultural and political life and a co-founder of the International Writers and Translators’ House in Ventspils. In 2006, she received the Baltic Assembly Prize in literature.

Alena Mornštajnová is a teacher of English and translator and author of five successful novels. Her most recent novel, Tiché roky (Years of Silence, 2019), has confirmed her position as a critically acclaimed, bestselling novelist with more than 500,000 copies of her books sold in the Czech Republic alone. Rights for her most successful novel Hana have been sold to nineteen countries including United Kingdom, Austria, Italy, France, Poland, The Netherlands and Russia.

Rebecca F. John was born in 1986, and grew up in Pwll, a small village on the south Wales coast.  She holds a BA in English with Creative Writing and an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University, as well as a PGCE PCET from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4Extra.  In 2015, her short story ‘The Glove Maker's Numbers’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.  She is the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award 2015. Her first short story collection, Clown's Shoes, was published through Parthian in 2015. Her first novel, The Haunting of Henry Twist, was published through Serpent's Tail in July 2017.  It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. In 2022, she will publish her first children's book with Firefly Press, as well as a second adult novel, The Empty Greatcoat, and a short novel, Fannie, with Honno Press. 

Efa Lois is an artist and writer originally from Ceredigion. Her work focuses primarily on mythology, the history of Welsh women, and the natural world and the importance of preserving it. She was awarded the Literature Wales New Writer's Bursary Award in 2020. She was the official artist of Tafwyl in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Her artwork has appeared in Cadw's' Welsh Women Making History', 'Henriet y Syffrajet' by Angharad Tomos (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2018), '10 o Sir Benfro' (Narberth Museum, 2021), and 'Y Stori Orau' by Lleucu Roberts (2021 National Eisteddfod Prose Medal Winner, Y Lolfa). Her paintings will also appear in Jon Gower's volume 'Cymry o Fri' (Y Lolfa, 2021). She is currently working on writing and drawing two volumes for children.

Caryl Lewis is a Welsh novelist. She has won Wales Book of the Year twice for her literary fiction and the Tir na n-Og Award for best children’s fiction in 2004 and 2015. Her novel Martha, Jac a Sianco was adapted for film and won 6 Welsh BAFTAS and the Spirit of the Festival Award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival. Her work is on the Welsh curriculum and is a successful screenwriter (working on BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden). Her debut English language novel DRIFT will be published by Penguin in April 2022 and Seed, her debut English novel for readers of 8+ will be published by MacMillan UK and MacMillan US in May 2022. She lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth in Wales.

Dr Kathryn Jones is Associate Professor of French at Swansea University. She chairs the national panel for Welsh-medium Modern Languages. She has published in the fields of French and German contemporary culture, francophone and French female postcolonial writers and travel writers, conflict studies and memory studies. Her most recent book, Hidden Text: Hidden Nation: (Re)Discoveries of Wales in Travel Writing in French and German (1780-2018), which she co-wrote with Carol Tully and Heather Williams, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2020.  

'European Writers' is an on-going project by EUNIC London aiming to promote European Literature in the UK. This event is supported by the Czech Centre London, Latvian Literature and the Embassy of Latvia.
In partnership with Literature Wales and Swansea University's Cultural Institute.

'The Dirt': Marianne Tuckman in conversation with  David Britton

Many Rivers to Cross is the debut novel from Dylan Moore, editor of the welsh agenda, and Hay Festival International Fellow. Written following a period volunteering at the Sanctuary Project in Newport, and partly based on interviews with asylum seekers and refugees, the novel traces a series of journeys – migrations across time and space – from the streets of Pillgwenlly, Newport to the ‘Jungle’ camp at Calais, and from Ethiopia to the island of Lampedusa.

About the Author
Dylan Moore has worked as a magazine editor, comprehensive school teacher, refugee support worker and chip shop counter assistant. His first book was Driving Home Both Ways, a collection of travel essays; his journalism has appeared in Lonely Planet, Vanity Fair, Times Educational Supplement and on BBC Radio 4. He is a Hay Festival International Fellow.

Contained in Ice by Lizzie Fincham

Poignant, elegant and timely, Lizzie Fincham's acute senses and imagistic rhythms give us glimpses beneath the surface of life, to the deeper connections. And always, running through the beauty and the evocation of the natural world, are warnings: 'The woods are turning to smoke'; 'As it always has, the bell tolls'… The delicacy of the poetry belies the magnitude of the themes: the losses and the hope — Contained in Ice contains 'All the small stuff. All the big stuff.'

Small by Natalie Ann Holborow
We all have our favourite demons. Weaved throughout poems on mythology, literary figures and other shores, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with rawness and honesty, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given physical form and voice. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is there, slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away ‒ yet forever haunted by a shadow far larger than her own.

Author Biographies
Gower born poet Lizzie Fincham is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has had 80 poems published in various journals and collections including New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, North, French Literary Review, New Zealand Review. Lizzie has been shortlisted for many prizes, including the prestigious Bridport Poetry Prize on three occasions. In 2017 she was awarded First prize for Brexit Blues in Brighton Poetry Competition. Her first collection Green Figs and Blue Jazz was published by Cinnamon Press in 2017. Her latest pamphlet, Contained in Ice, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2020.

Natalie Ann Holborow is an award-winning writer whose debut collection, And Suddenly You Find Yourself, was launched at the International Kolkata Literary Festival and listed as Wales Arts Review’s ‘Best of 2017’. She is co-editor of the Cheval anthology. Winner of the 2015 Terry Hetherington Award and a recent finalist in the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word competition, her second book Small (Parthian) and collaborative pamphlet with Mari Ellis Dunning The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass (Black Rabbit Press) were both published in 2020.

THIS EVENT WILL BE CARRIED OUT IN THE MEDIUM OF  RUSSIAN, WITH SIMULTANEOUS ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Russian literature is going through a unique period of complete freedom and independence from authorities in history. In this lecture, Professor Aleksey Varlamov will focus on new trends in Russian literature, including the role of the writer as storyteller rather than as prophet or ideologist, as well as the current literary landscape in Russia, with a focus on non-fiction, biography and the status of movements such as Realism, Post-Realism and Postmodernism. The extent to which we can comprehend the present through the works of Zakhar Prilepin, R. Senchin, A. Salnikov and Grigorij Sluzhitel will also be discussed.

Professor Aleksey Varlamov is Rector of the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing, Moscow. He is also a prominent writer, publicist and researcher of the history of 20th Century Russian literature and his books have been translated into several languages.

The event is part of the UK-Russia Creative Bridge Programme 2020-21 organised by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow with the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing Moscow

Book Synopsis
Winter, 1904, and feisty twenty-one-year-old Ellen has been summoned back from her new life in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the family farm on windswept Gower, in a last bid to prevent the impending death of her alcoholic father. On her return, she finds the family in disarray. Ailing William is gambling away large swathes of Thomas land; frustrated Eleanor is mourning the husband she once knew; and Ellen’s younger twin brothers face difficult choices. Ellen, tasked with putting her family’s lives in order, finds herself battling one impossible decision after another. Resourceful, passionate, and forthright, can she remain in Gower, where being female still brings with it so many limitations? Can she endure being so close to her lost love? Will she choose home and duty, or excitement and opportunity across the Atlantic?

About the Author
Jane Fraser lives, work and writes in the Gower peninsula, south Wales, in a house facing the sea. Her first collection of short fiction, ‘The South Westerlies’ was published by SALT in 2019. Her debut novel, ‘Advent’ is forthcoming from HONNO, the UK’s longest-standing independent women’s press, in January 2021. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Manchester Fiction Prize; and in 2018 a prize winner in the Fish Memoir Prize’. She is an alumni of Swansea University with an MA (distinction) and PhD in Creative Writing. She was a Hay Festival Writer at Work in 2018 and 2019. She is grandmother to Megan, Florence and Alice.

www.janefraserwriter.com
Twitter @jfraserwriter

In association with Honno Press

Alexander S. Pushkin was called the “Sun of Russian Poetry” by his contemporaries. The poet had an extraordinary pedigree. His mother's great-grandfather, one of the most educated people of his time, descended from a noble princely Abyssinian family and served faithfully to the Russian tsar Peter the Great. The biographies of Pushkin’s ancestors are as interesting as the novels of the 18-19th centuries. Pushkin wrote:

My pride of blood I have subdued;
I'm but an unknown singer
Simply Pushkin, not Moussin,
My strength is mine, not from court:
I am a writer, a citizen.

The prominent Russian writer Ivan Turgenev maintained that one of the distinctive features of Pushkin's poetry was graceful and smart simplicity. In his writing he was engaged in a gratifying creative dialogue with Western poets -  Shakespeare, Voltaire, Byron, and Walter Scott among them.

Pushkin’s polyphonic lyrics largely influenced a great number of  Russian poets and created a new poetic language. The poet was also an efficient historian: his heroes of Russian antiquity laid the foundations of the Russian historical novel.

The poet’s dynamic descriptions of various characters of his life and times helped create a highly animated image of Russia which made it possible to name his main work Eugene Onegin “the encyclopedia of Russian life."

The lecture will also explain why Pushkin's poetry is so difficult to translate, and his writing has not become a revelation to Western readership.

The event is part of the UK-Russia Creative Bridge Programme 2020-21 organised by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow with the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing Moscow

Book Synopsis
In the aftermath of catastrophic religious wars, God has been banned. As snow begins to fall, a young woman – Jem – arrives in Underhill. The isolated community offers her shelter, unwittingly unleashing events that threaten their very existence. Jem announces that she has been sent to Underhill by God to prepare the villagers to fulfil a devastating purpose. Some believe she is a prophet and defy the law to join her God's Threads religion. Others are certain she is lying. With their fragile community beginning to fracture, Eileen, the first and most devoted of the believers, decides to record the birth of this new religion in her own Book of Jem. As God’s Threads gather for the apocalypse, the words Eileen has written will determine the fate of Underhill and, ultimately, of Jem herself. But can Eileen be trusted to tell the truth? And how can anyone know what to believe?

About the Author
After years of failing to write in the middle of the night, Carole Hailey abandoned a lucrative career as a lawyer to become an impoverished novelist. She subsequently accumulated an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths and a PhD from Swansea University in 2020. Carole was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award 2020 and is a London Library Emerging Writer 2020/21. The Book of Jem is her first novel.

In association with Watermark Press

In this special online event, a panel of experts in crime fiction, thriller writing and Law discuss the intersection between crime fiction and legal truth. What is the relationship between crime fiction and true crime? And to what extent must the crime writer become a legal expert? A session full of suspense focusing on European crime fiction featuring eminent barrister and Head of Swansea University's Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Professor Elwen Evans QC, along with Swansea-born Philip Gwynne Jones, author of the hugely successful "Nathan Sutherland" crime novels (set in Venice), and translator and editor Dr Kat Hall, a specialist in German thriller writing and creator of 'Mrs Peabody Investigates.' In conversation with Professor D.J. Britton, Playwright and Head of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University.

The Panelists


Professor Elwen Evans QC is Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean for the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She also holds the University portfolio for Welsh Language and Culture.

Elwen read Law at Girton College, Cambridge graduating with a double first: M.A. (Cantab). She was fortunate to receive a range of Scholarships from her College, University and professional body. On graduating she attended the Inns of Court School of Law and was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1980. She was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2002. Elwen has enjoyed a very successful career as a barrister choosing to practice mainly in Wales. She has undertaken a wide range of legal work, specialising in criminal law at trial and appellate levels. Her work has included many serious, complex, sensitive and high profile cases such as leading the prosecution team in the April Jones case and the defence team in the Gleision mine disaster case. She sits as a Crown Court Recorder having been appointed in 2001. She was Head of Iscoed Chambers for over 15 years, stepping down on her appointment to Swansea University. She is a Bencher of her Inn, has been honoured by Gorsedd y Beirdd for her services to Law in Wales and was a Commissioner on the Commission on Justice in Wales. She has served on a wide range of external bodies and committees reflecting her areas of professional experience and interest. In 2018 she was in the top 10 of a list celebrating 100 of Wales’ most inspirational women.

Elwen joined Swansea University in 2015 when she was appointed as Head of the College of Law & Criminology where she supported its growth and transformation into an exciting and dynamic centre for learning, teaching, research, impact and engagement. Today, the University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law is recognised as being at the forefront of innovation in legal education and practice.

Philip Gwynne Jones was born in Swansea in 1966, and now works as a writer, teacher and translator in Venice. His first novel, “The Venetian Game”, was Waterstones Thriller of the Month for March 2018, and a Times Top 5 bestseller. His most recent novel, “Venetian Gothic”, is now available, with a further four titles scheduled. He has written for the Sunday Times and the Big Issue, and is a frequent guest on BBC Radio Wales.In his spare time he enjoys cooking, art, classical music and opera; and can occasionally be seen and heard singing bass with the Cantori Veneziani.
Philip is published by Little, Brown under the Constable imprint


Dr Kat Hall is a translator and editor. She is an Honorary Research Associate in Modern Languages at Swansea University, where she worked as a lecturer for many years. She is the editor of Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi (UWP 2016) and runs the ‘Mrs Peabody Investigates’ crime blog. She is currently translating Punishment, by German barrister turned crime writer Ferdinand von Schirach.

The event is part of the UK-Russia Creative Bridge Programme 2020-21 organised by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow with the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing Moscow

'Anna Karenina: Screen Adaptations of the Novel': Andrey Gelasimov

The first screen adaptation of “Anna Karenina” was produced in the very beginning of the 20th century. Since then this Russian novel became one of the most popular sources for inspiration of cinematographers all over the world. The most beautiful and absolutely legendary actresses were involved in visualisation of that stunning and suffering character created by Leo Tolstoy almost a century and a half ago. During our conversation we’ll try to understand reasons of such durable attraction comparing different film versions between each other and the novel itself.

The event is part of the UK-Russia Creative Bridge Programme 2020-21 organised by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow with the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing Moscow

In this special online event, Max Porter talks about his career as an editor, bookseller and critically-acclaimed British writer, before discussing the changing shape of the English novel, myth and modern forms, his bestselling works and approach to writing and the relationship between literature and literacy.

The event will include special readings by Max from his award-winning works Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, as well as his new book The Death of Francis Bacon, 'an attempt to write as painting, not about it'.

In conversation with Dr Elaine Canning, Head of Cultural Engagement and Development at Swansea University.

Award-winning Max Porter is one of Britain’s most original and innovative writers. Max's first novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers' Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages. Enda Walsh’s stage adaptation starting Cillian Murphy toured in 2019. Max's second novel Lanny (Faber, 2019) was a Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller and longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. His highly anticipated third book, The Death of Francis Bacon, will be published by Faber in January 2021. Max lives in Bath with his family.

‘It’s hard to express how much I loved Lanny. Books this good don’t come along very often. It’s a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart. It’s a novel to press into the hands of everyone you know and say, read this.’ - MAGGIE O’FARRELL

A luminous reading experience - (Grief is the Thing with Feathers) (TLS)

An agile, life-affirming account of mourning. (Grief is the Thing with Feathers) (Sunday Times)

The event is part of the UK-Russia Creative Bridge Programme 2020-21 organised by the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy in Moscow with the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation
The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing Moscow

Book Synopsis

Born in 1373, Margery Kempe is the writer of the first known female-authored autobiography in the English language. As an effusive, often rambunctious, visionary woman living in the lay world, her particular mode of spirituality was not always well-received in a cultural milieu that frequently pathologized, or deemed heretical, ‘excessive’ female expression. Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course (D.S. Brewer) is the first full-length study of The Book of Margery Kempe from a medical humanities perspective. Harnessing the ubiquitous medieval notion of Christ the Physician, it offers a new way of reading the Book as a narrative of Kempe's own engagement with the medical paradigms of which she has previously been a passive subject. Focusing on the interactions of medicine, mysticism and reproduction as a feminist project, the book is a broad traverse through the life course, exploring Kempe's persistent attendance to her mystical body and refusal to compromise her instinct to authentically show how she feels.

About the Author
Laura Kalas is a Lecturer in Medieval literature in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has published in several academic journals, contributed to The Literary Encyclopedia, and has articles in The Conversation and The Independent. Her work on the medical recipe at the end of The Book of Margery Kempe has been featured in The Guardian and in the BBC History Magazine. Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine is her first book.

In association with Boydell and Brewer.

Dai Smith reflects on the intellectual cross currents of his life as both historian and novelist as he launches his latest novel, The Crossing, in conversation with Jon Gower.

The novel builds upon and completes Dai’s trilogy on the fictive history of Industrial South Wales. The Crossing, polyphonic and multi-vocal, is a startling and provocative mix of the actual and imaginative in its intertwining of individual destinies, real and fictional ones, with a society’s fated and shaping direction.

Dai is now writing a work of memory making which, he says, is neither autobiography nor memoir but, rather, both forms held in suspension in the mind of recall.

In association with PARTHIAN

In this podcast, Owen Sheers reads from and discusses his award-winning poetry collection, Skirrid Hill.

Skirrid Hill revolves around the two poems Y Gaer and The Hillfort, the titles themselves suggesting the linguistic divide in Wales, from poems concerned with childhood, a Welsh landscape and family, to a more outward-looking vision both geographically and historically.