Cultural highlights 2025: Genre-busters, tearjerkers and heart-wrenching poetry

Geraint Lewis

The fiction highlight for me was Pulse by Cynan Jones (Granta £14.99). It is a book of six taut short stories about men struggling with the elements in various ways.

His descriptions of the natural world are thrillingly original. The style is such a pared down force that it pulls you, in a good way, to concentrate intensely on every line as each story unfolds, the ensuing tension part of the enjoyment.

Every writer is unique but Cynan has forged such an original form, almost a genre of its own, an invigorating combination of poetry and prose. Some of the images stay with you for a very long time. Riveting.

I’m not a twitcher but after reading Jon Gower’s Birdland (Harper North £22) I wish I was.

It’s a fascinating ‘journey around Britain on the Wing’. As you’d expect from a Jon Gower book it’s packed with interesting and often funny anecdotes.

There’s nothing amusing about global warming and its harrowing effect on so many species of birds and there is a serious side too to ‘Birdland’ that should worry us all.

It’s the community of bird lovers, however, that make this book such a rewarding read.

In an age of polarised views and so much negativity it’s wonderful to see so much good being done in so many different ways to help keep species off the dreaded Red Data list of endangered birds.

Seeing aspects of humanity at its unostentatious best was strangely uplifting.

In the Welsh language I enjoyed Neil Rosser’s first novel Wythnos Ryfedd Gwilym Puw (Y Lolfa £9.99).

As well as being a satire on the school inspection system it pokes fun at modern life in general, with our obsession with technology and mobile phones.

The Welsh language theatre event of the year was Theatr Cymru’s Huw Fyw, an astute comedy written by Tudur Owen, who also performed the titular role.

If you missed it, it’s back by popular demand, touring in April/May 2026.

Peter Finch 

This has been a good year for books despite a steady decline in public funding pretty much everywhere. In these situations technology can sometimes come to your aid. S

elf-publishing once an expensive and difficult pastime can today be a much easier activity. Wishing to avoid the trap of editorial interference, uncertainty and delay Solva poet, Ifor Thomas, decided to bring out his most recent set of popular, ballsy and cleverly engaging pieces himself.

It’s a great read – first hilarious then heart wrenching. The Undertaker’s Invoice from Thomas’s own InVoice Books looks just as professional as the very latest titles from Parthian, Penguin or Seren.

And one of those actual very latest would be Grahame Davies’ A Darker Way which is from Seren and proves to be one of the year’s most beautiful sets.

‘The rosebud’s ruby on the briar / each spring is a secret fire’.

This poet seems to have special access to the higher plains. This trip into the darkness might well have provided us with Grahame’s best yet.

Over among the historians pugnacious, witty and unputdownable Dai Smith, at 80 for god’s sake, has now turned to poetry.

For 2025 he’s given us Street Fighting and other Past Times (Parthian) which entertains as much as it challenges and never loses sight of the Valley places from which its inspiration springs.

ChatGPT, which I am sure Dai would have nothing to do with, tells me Rian Elizabeth’s poetry is famous for its emotional intensity. There’s a fair bit of that in her 2025 Broken Sleep title maybe i’ll call gillian anderson.

This set is rendered entirely in lower case in my copy which, as I can personally testify, getting the world to stick with will prove a challenge.

Rian’s work has an electric, urban intensity which grabs you and sticks.

‘once, / in the middle of the night / when I was very drunk / and not wearing any trousers / or had lost my trousers, / I walked home from a party to the wrong house.’

Book of the Year for me, though, is more poetry reported than poetry itself.

Jeff Towns’ The Wilder Shores of Dylan Thomas (H’mm Foundation) is a landscape-format heavyweight slab of essays on this most famous of poetry men and his place in the Welsh (and other) universes.

There are eighteen well illustrated chapters here ranging from ‘Dylan Thomas: R S Thomas & Centenaries’ to ‘Dylan Thomas, Sir Peter Blake & Under Milk Wood’.

Towns, the bookseller and DT expert you’d go to the pub with more often than you’d listen to in the lecture theatre, has long turned out readable and entertaining DT reportage.

With this heavy-duty, full colour volume, though, he’s finally excelled himself. A wonderful set.

Catherine Kirwan

I loved ‘Trespasses’ on Channel 4, based on the excellent book by Louise Kennedy: a note perfect adaptation, featuring what must be a BAFTA winning performance by Gillian Anderson. I went all in on the unmissable Traitors Ireland’ and ‘Celebrity Traitors’.

And if you haven’t seen ‘Better Call Saul’, watch it now. Outstanding all the way through, but there has never been a better final episode of anything. I haven’t quite made my mind up about ‘Pluribus’ on Apple TV, by the same creator, but I’m sticking with it.
Film

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’, about the making of ‘Nebraska’, was understated and downbeat. I adored it. On a brighter note, I saw Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ at Cork International Film Festival: pure joy. And I loved ‘One Battle After Another’.

Books

Jane Casey’s ‘The Secret Room’, the 12th in the Maeve Kerrigan series, was a perfect gift for fans of the series – a one sitting read that had me in tears.

‘Burn After Reading’ by Catherine Ryan Howard, about a ghostwriter holed up with a possible murderer in an empty Florida resort, is a dark unputdownable treasure.

And I finally read the extraordinary ‘Say Nothing’ by Patrick Radden Keefe, before watching the superb tv adaptation on Channel 4.

For a jaundiced swipe at the same territory, I highly recommend Mick Herron’s ‘Clown Town’, the latest in the wonderful Slow Horses series.

‘Tradecraft: Writers on John le Carré’ (edited by Federico Varese with an introduction by Mick Herron) is essential reading and the exhibition at the Bodleian (with a fine selection of souvenir fridge magnets) is well worth the trip to Oxford.

Theatre

Eileen Walsh was brilliant in ‘The Second Woman’ at Cork Midsummer Festival. And I loved Marty Rea’s Macbeth (Druid Theatre Company, at the Gaiety in Dublin).