Culture Highlights 2024: Revolutionising our world view and nothing lost in translation

John Geraint

Christmas is a time for family, for friends… and for revolutionising our world view!

So taking my cue from those three headings – and entirely unapologetically – I’d like to share this trio of books published this year.

The revolutionary first. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury) is a masterly account by William Dalrymple which lives up to its blurb.

A lifetime of scholarship enables Dalrymple to show how Indian art, religion, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the ancient world – and how much of all that has been forgotten.

Dalrymple repositions India, not China or Europe, as the global wellspring of learning and power. It’s a breathtaking shift of perspective.

Next, the friend. Dai George’s How to Think Like a Poet: The Poets That Made Our World and Why We Need Them (also Bloomsbury) makes me prouder than ever to claim friendship with him. It’s refreshed my understandings of those old, old dead white men – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas – I studied when young.

Delight

But, from Li Bai to Audre Lorde, it’s also brought other voices from other places to delight, intrigue and challenge me. Dai says his book “tries to make poetry a vibrant, inviting subject that has no entry requirements”. It succeeds. Clear, unstuffy, useful, important writing – writing that enriches the reader.

Finally, even closer to home. In STAR: Poems for the Christmas Season (Culture & Democracy Press, via Gwales.com), my wife, Angela Graham, has ensured I need no other Christmas present.

Is there anything new to say about the Festive Season? Yes, says this book, joyfully and triumphantly. You’ve heard of the Three Kings? But have you ever thought about the Three Queens, their partners? Angela has, and she crafts three contrasting imaginative accounts of these women’s experience – in profound, moving, witty verse.

There’s more: poems that puncture Yuletide sentimentality, that celebrate the connective, collective value in familiar rituals, that challenge our complacency and plumb the darker, midwinter depths of how we treat our planet and our neighbours.

Come to think of it, both Dai and Angela – as well as William Dalrymple – give us the wherewithal to reimagine the way we see the world. I’m glad to have these revolutionaries with me, as I face the uncertainties of a New Year to come.

Ant Evans

What a year 2024 has been! Having received this year’s request for highlights I won’t lie, I was quite daunted. Simply because there have been so many!

This year certainly hasn’t disappointed. But one event kept popping into my head and taking centre stage: this year’s Book of the Year Awards and my getting to review eight of the shortlisted titles across genres, from poetry and creative non-fiction to novels for children and young people as well as short stories.

The variety of books I read truly was excellent. I most certainly did not envy the judges the decisions they had to make!

I truly relished the challenge of getting all of my reviews written and ready to go in the run up to the evening of the awards ceremony, which this year were held in Galeri, here in Caernarfon.

However, as anyone who knows me will tell you, if there’s a way to make life more challenging (it’d be rather boring otherwise after all) I’ll seek it out. In the case of the shortlisted titles I was reviewing, I decided to set about translating extracts from the volumes of poetry from Welsh into English, including the original extracts, as well as the translations in my reviews. Quite the challenge when I don’t have a poetic bone in my body!

That being said, I felt it was essential to include both the extracts and translations so that, hopefully, English speaking readers of my reviews could get a sense of why I enjoyed particular poems, or even specific verses. I do hope that I succeeded in that regard.

For my money, 2024 has set a very high bar indeed for 2025. I for one can’t wait to see what highlights next year will bring!