Jon Gower There are few radio programmes that can be described as outpourings of love but The Friendly Garden, a three-hour tribute to the late Chris Needs, presented by his friend and sometimes musical collaborator Mal Pope was just that, a show suffused with the stuff. Chris Needs, MBE, was […]
Jon Gower This year’s Wales Book of the Year awards were announced without the usual glitz and ceremony but the quality on show in both languages was ample cause for celebration. In the case of Nation Cymru the fact that its editor Ifan Morgan Jones brought both the Golwg 360 […]
Jon Gower This probing, honest and illuminating collection of essays is of course very timely but it’s also one of the best books published in Wales in many a moon. Many of its contributors address matters of race at a time when Black Lives Matter grows from a call for […]
Hungarians have come together to send a ‘love letter’ to Wales, in a trilingual video produced by Welsh-Hungarian cultural initiative Magyar Cymru. The video features residents from Hungary’s ‘Welshest village’ Kunágota, opera and folk singers, educators, as well as Hungarians from Cardiff to Caernarfon who have embraced the Welsh […]
Jon Gower This collection of 25 tales first appeared a third of a century ago but now appears in brand new livery as part of the Seren Classics series. Its editor, the poet John Davies suggests in the introduction that ‘A good story offers a past and future that aren’t […]
Jon Gower In 1980 the Mancunian poet John Cooper Clarke painted a chillingly dark picture of Britain in his song ‘Beasley Street,’ which reserved special venom for Keith Joseph, who played the axeman as Margaret Thatcher’s Minister for Industry and was subsequently a controversial Minister for Education and Science: […]
Jon Gower The cover photograph of this collection of late writing by the finest novelist of the Welsh borderlands shows Evans staring resolutely ahead of her, a fixedness underlined by the clear-lined set of her jaw and the angled jut of a cigarette held between her fingers. It’s the gaze […]
Jon Gower Sam Adams has been a distinguished feature of the Welsh writing scene for decades, as a poet and editor but the past decade has seen him turn novelist, with his first foray into the form appearing in 2010 with the literary detective novel ‘Prichard’s Nose.’ This was followed […]
Sarah Tanburn Catrin Kean has given us a delightful, timely novel. The jacket tells us it is the story of her great-grandparents who married in 1878. That is a small teaser for the tale of Ellen, the hard-working Tiger Bay girl, and her husband, Samuel. We meet Ellen at the […]
Jon Gower Cast as a novel about the secrets and history of female power, this is a long and languorous read which captures you quietly but surely. It’s neither a book crammed full of incident, nor does it have a sprawling cast of characters to animate its 350 pages but […]
