Category: Opinion

The Emptying of Covid-19. It sounds like the title of a Thomas Pynchon novel. But for three long months, the skies cleared, the beaches were clean and the roadsides hummed with birdsong. All over the world, this sampling of a calmer, kinder environment allowed everyone a pause – hopefully, for thought. How might a less […]
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Shape-shifting and Skin-walking

Kaite O'Reilly on writers who are venturing out of their traditional form to experiment with prose, poetry, screenplays and drama

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

Writers are shape-shifters and skin-walkers. We’re liars, able to take on stories, dialects, eras, perspectives, genders and species not our own and c …

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Pairing Wales and South America

Richard Gwyn

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

Richard Gwyn on the central, serious, importance of make-believe to Latin American life and literature, and the gestation of his festival, Fiction Fie …

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Writing the Mother Tongue

Eluned Gramich

PUBLISHED ON: 11/02/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

Earlier this year Eluned Gramich visited Jaipur Literature Festival and Hyderabad Literature Festival, discovering that the old rules about translatio …

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Swansea Automatic

Kieron Smith champions this poetry collection – part science-textbook pastiche, part local history, part guidebook – on a city that refuses to be pinned down

PUBLISHED ON: 29/01/20

CATEGORY: Opinion

how does a colour become a symbolic colour? how does a place become a symbolic place? Why is this book about SWANSEA and not ABERYSTWYTH or LONDON? In …

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Come into the Pomegranate Garden

Caroline Stockford

PUBLISHED ON: 19/12/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

I first met Haydar Ergülen on the Turkish island of Cunda where we had gathered as twenty-plus translators to work on a novella and on Haydar’s poems. …

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Now I Become Myself: A Woman’s Voice in Music and Poetry, a Lecture by Rhian Samuel

Demi Roberts traces the career of a transatlantic classical composer from Aberdare, and the factors that helped and hindered her progression as a female professional artist

PUBLISHED ON: 10/12/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

This year’s annual Richard Burton lecture was delivered by Rhian Samuel in the Great Hall of Swansea University’s Bay Campus. Rhian, a widely successf …

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Dear Christine: A Tribute to Christine Keeler, at Swansea’s Elysium Gallery

Demi Roberts notes the compassion inspired by this exploration of hypocritical attitudes to female sexuality and media scapegoating

PUBLISHED ON: 20/11/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

The Elysium gallery is an unsuspected little gem at the top of Swansea’s high street. Neatly nestled between two shops with ‘For Sale’ signs in the wi …

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Kamil and Francis (presented by Theatr Cadair) by DJ Britton

Demi Roberts is grateful for small lapses of history, on watching this reimagining of an historical encounter between St Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil

PUBLISHED ON: 12/11/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

My sister and I arrive at the Taliesin Theatre fifteen minutes early, enough time to share a bag of Maltesers. People are clustered into circular grou …

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Tales from the Riverbank

Richard J Parfitt

PUBLISHED ON: 23/07/19

CATEGORY: Opinion

Newport has always been a terminus for the nomadic working class. Forever economically depressed and an unemployment black spot – the first township y …

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