Tag: Welsh novels
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Port Talbot, the novel: Jon Doyle’s ‘Communion’
Port Talbot has waited a long time for the novel it deserves. Now it has one: Communion, the first long work of fiction by Jon Doyle, who was brought up in the town, and still lives there. If you know Port Talbot you’ll soon recognise many of the places that feature in the book –…
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Cefn Bryn and the writers
The sandsone ridge of Cefn Bryn is an obvious magnet for painters, but it doesn’t seem to have drawn many creative writers, despite its brooding presence along the backbone of the Gower peninsula. One exception is Amy Dillwyn, the pioneering industrialist, feminist and lesbian, in her best-known work The Rebecca rioter (1880), an historical novel…
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Richard Owain Roberts’s ‘Hello friend we missed you’
Hello friend we missed you is Richard Owain Roberts’s first novel. Published by Parthian, it was nominated for this year’s Guardian ‘Not the Booker’ prize. It duly won the award in October 2020 after a readers’ vote. In the book Roberts sets himself a big challenge: how to engage us as readers with a protagonist…
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Television, books and lists
Television is scared stiff of books. It’s different on the radio, and it used to be different on television in the distant past – remember Melvyn Bragg’s excellent Read all about it In the 1970s? – but those who decide what we watch on the box today seem to think that to make a programme…
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Afallon = Abertawe?
‘Nofel ddarllenadwy a chrefftus’ yw’r ansoddeiriau ar glawr Afallon gan Robat Gruffudd, a enillodd Gwobr Goffa Daniel Owen llynedd. Disgrifiad teg iawn, ‘swn i’n dweud: mae’n llyfr sy’n dal ei afael arnoch chi hyd y diwedd. Y cymeriad canolog yw Rhys John, dyn sy wedi gweld llawer o’r byd, ond ychydig iawn o hunan-dwyll sy…