• Free content

    Kendal Mountain Festival: Levison Wood

    Levison Wood, one of the most renowned speakers at this year’s Kendal Mountain Festival, shares stories about his incredible adventures and the people he meets along the way. Best known for walking the length of the Nile, the Americas, and the Arabian Peninsula, Wood is one of the most inspirational …

    Read more
  • Free content

    From Love Bugs to Period Taboos: Kendal Mountain Festival 2

    The Kendal Mountain Festival showcases some of the most influential explorers, books, and films in the industry. One of the many documentary features that are available to watch until 31 December is The Love Bugs (originally screened in the Feature Films/Human Spirit festival strand and available vi …

    Read more
  • Free content

    Tough Women: Kendal Mountain Festival

    The Kendal Mountain Festival is on now and on demand until 31 December 2020. Tickets from £5.50, with some free events.  On Friday 20 November at the Kendal Mountain Festival, I was lucky enough to attend an event called Tough Women, which introduced four incredible explorers, from a collection of t …

    Read more
  • Free content

    Jan Morris 1926-2020

    Wales’ most celebrated writer, Jan Morris, has died, aged 94.  The news comes at the end of a grim year during which her guiding passion – travel – has been on hold. If reading has been a survival strategy for many people during 2020, then for those of us who have itchy feet, a viable solution was t …

    Read more
  • Free content

    How Do You Run a Virtual Retreat?

    How do you run a virtual retreat? When the premise of what you do is gathering writers together in beautiful Snowdonia to escape their day jobs and eat, drink, talk and think about writing, how can you do this online? The answer turned out to be very well. It took a little adjustment from the writer …

    Read more
  • Free content

    Mai by Georgia Ruth

    Evocation of locales that hold a personal connection to artists is a common feature in the medium of music. Rich soundscapes will frequently echo places, times and atmospheres, either by alluding to them through lyrics and instrumentation, or as a result of being produced in a particular environment …

    Read more

Explore the latest from the New Welsh Review

Subscribers only

The Man in Black. Peter Moore: Wales’ Worst Serial Killer

Chris Moss is fascinated by a book told in a level-headed narrative that trainee lawyers and police could learn from. And while trainee crime novelists should find inspiration here, it shows there is not always a ball of darkness in killers, but sometimes an empty void

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Like many crime stories, this one begins with a body – Anthony Davies, forty, found on Pensarn Beach by a dogwalker on the morning of 18 December, 199 …

Read more
Free content

The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage

Chris Moss finds that there is something romantic and true about the fourteen men and one woman who lived first, wrote afterwards, and saw in the tramping life a mode of being that was more meaningful than home-focused domestic existence

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Jim Phelan, in collection of Ian Cutler   An extensive list of words for people of no fixed abode in the introduction to this book reminds us how …

Read more
Subscribers only

Tiger Girl

Vicky MacKenzie lauds an eighth collection, shimmering with beauty and rage, by the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize-winning poet, a writer who refuses to flinch

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Tiger Girl shimmers with beauty and rage: for every exquisite description of a bird or tiger, there’s an incident of cruelty and horror, unfolded on t …

Read more
Subscribers only

Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation

Edward O Wilson, adapted by Jim Ottaviani, art by CM Butzer, colouring by Hilary Sycamore

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Edward O Wilson, as readers of the New Welsh Review will know, is one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, an entomologist with an unrivall …

Read more
Free content

The Distance

Set in apartheid South Africa, this allegory of boxing, blood and brotherhood, writes Chris Moss, ripples with meanings and possibilities, is full of grace and tenderness, and demonstrates the light touch of a prose master

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Great boxing matches are ‘allegories authored in blood’, wrote Budd Schulberg. It’s quoted late on in Ivan Vladislavíc’s sixth novel, which, among oth …

Read more
Subscribers only

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country

Ted Parry concludes that this book on periphery and centre deserves a place on the bookshelves of any historian concerned with England, and that Tom Hazeldine’s reshaping of ‘the Northern Question’ will dominate how Wales comes to be governed

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

The Northern Question is the opening shot of a campaign to place the North-South divide back at the centre of thinking about England. Belying its orig …

Read more
Subscribers only

Wild Persistence

Vicky MacKenzie admires a poetry collection of humour and revelry, lit by the repeated flare of violence and warmed by the unapologetic need to live the life of one’s own choosing

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

From the very first line, ‘A joy of noise’, there’s humour and revelry in Katrina Naomi’s third full-length collection. There’s pleasure taken in a lo …

Read more
Subscribers only

Well-laid Hedges and Cider

Jim Pratt failed all his exams and was gently advised by his father to get a job. He recalls his first forestry posting at Osbaston, near the council’s rubbish tip in Monmouth, in 1960

PUBLISHED ON: 03/11/20

CATEGORY: Memoir

‘Coming to Mrs Wallet’s?’ Tom Johns was lighting his bicycle lamp, shielding the rather damp match that he had taken from a small tin and struck on hi …

Read more