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    The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes our Lives

    The Museum of Portable Sound will bring you into contact with an extensive collection of strange sonic entities. You can listen to an old MiniDisc player, a vintage Ukranian radio and an iPhone full of esoteric field recordings. I thought about this museum a lot while reading Jude Rogers’ new memoir …

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    In Praise of Marc Almond, True Advocate of World Culture

    Beyond a community of devoted fans who follow his footsteps everywhere, a valuable, even precious side to Marc Almond’s work remains a little-known secret. The general public knows the sweet enfant terrible from Southport who reached the top of the charts around the globe with ‘Tainted Love’ and som …

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    Four Dervishes

    Four Dervishes is Welsh–Pakistani writer and teacher Hammad Rind’s debut novel. He is a polyglot whose love of languages and Eastern literature shines through in this beguiling book, which incorporates elements of the dastan, an ornate form of oral history hailing from Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and …

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    The Village

    Cities are hip. Towns are gritty. Hamlets are romantic. Capitals are – snooty accent coming – capital. Villages are problematic. What do you think of when someone says ‘village’. Idiots? A green, for men in whites playing cricket? No shops, no post office, no BAMEs, no youth? Perhaps nimbys, or twee …

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    Welsh [Plural]:Essays on the Future of Wales

    This snazzy-looking book is subtitled Essays on the Future of Wales, but many of the nineteen short pieces collected therein are bits of memoir, diary entries and freeform reflections – and where the authors linger on the recent past, the ancient one seeps through. This is inevitable but also a pote …

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    Planet Blues

    It’s early winter. I’ve just been for a walk in a field. It’s part of the large estate that surrounds my home – a rented, retired 1830s farmhouse – and, as far as Lancashire fields go, it’s a green and pleasant one. The effectual fencing is wire, but there are drystone walls, long-ago laid hedges ru …

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Explore the latest from the New Welsh Review

Free content

Books for Alien Girls: Fiction and Neurodivergence

JL George's personal and practical reflections on the role neurodivergence can and should play when writing fiction

PUBLISHED ON: 26/04/22

CATEGORY: Author process, Essays, Opinion

As a young reader, I devoured books about mad girls. Fiction and memoir; all kinds of disorders. Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation; Wasted and Life- …

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The Art of Blue Woman

Jonathan Page on the Welsh female artists who inspired the protagonist of his novel Blue Woman: Gwen John, Joan Baker and Shani Rhys James

PUBLISHED ON: 30/03/22

CATEGORY: Author process, Essays

Blue Woman (published by Weatherglass Books), is the fictional biography of a Welsh painter, Rose Hartwood. Her career is a long one, stretching from …

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Let Me Tell You What I Saw

Shara Atashi finds that the cruelty of war is a universal theme in this dual language Arabic-English long poem written by a soldier of the Iraq war, and makes broader comparisons with English and American war poetry and fiction

PUBLISHED ON: 30/03/22

CATEGORY: Essays, Reviews

The effect of this long poem (an abridged dual-language Arabic-English version of the 550-page poem ‘Uruk’s Anthem’) could be described as a shellshoc …

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Hafez and Jones: Poets United for Peace

Shara Atashi on the links between eighteenth-century polyglot William Jones and fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez

PUBLISHED ON: 30/03/22

CATEGORY: Column

(Above) frieze at University College, Oxford chapel showing Sir William Jones taking notes from Hindi speakers and scholars, (top) roof of Hafez tomb …

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The Making – and Unmanning – of the Welsh Collier

A comparative history, a repackaged work of nonfiction and an essay collection provide a rich seam of reflections, writes Chris Moss in this feature-length review-essay

PUBLISHED ON: 30/03/22

CATEGORY: Essays, Reviews

MIners’ houses, Trealaw, Rhondda Valley by Isabel Alexander, from Miner’s Day.   Miner’s Day by BL Coombes, with illustrations [‘Rhondda images’] …

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The Listening Project

Ed Garland is inspired by a hybrid form of fiction built from and creatively perceived through restricted signals, exploring varieties of listening and sensory experience

PUBLISHED ON: 01/03/22

CATEGORY: Reviews

The Listening Project follows the life of a woman called Imogen, whose difficulties arise both from her hearing loss and from family tensions over her …

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The Bloodless Boy

This meticulously researched Restoration whodunit has prescient themes of extremist politics, political instability and corruption at the highest level, writes Liz Jones

PUBLISHED ON: 01/03/22

CATEGORY: Reviews

London, New Year’s Day 1678, twelve years after the Great Fire and eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell’s republic and the restoration of the mo …

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Smooth Operator: The Life and Times of Cyril Lakin, Editor, Broadcaster and Politician

Despite its subject being un-flamboyant, Liz Jones finds fascinating this biography of a clubbable proponent of thoughtful conservativism who became the literary editor of the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph

PUBLISHED ON: 01/03/22

CATEGORY: Reviews

At first glance, this biography of Conservative MP Cyril Lakin appears an unlikely project for author and chronicler of the British Communist Party, G …

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