Category: Opinion
The Trouble With Gloom
Ed Garland’s riposte to John Barnie on megacities and overpopulation, and John Barnie’s response in return
Read moreBooks for Alien Girls: Fiction and Neurodivergence
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- …
Read moreRowan Williams and Rublev
Poems about paintings, or ’painting poems’, are a great tradition. WH Auden’s ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’, about Bruegel’s masterpiece ‘The Fall of Icarus’ …
Read moreLand of Whose Fathers?
Land is an enigma. It is soil, roads, houses and mountains, but more than any or all of those. It is, in a sense, all we have as humans. It is everywh …
Read moreLest We Forget
The recent actions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tearing down statues of the slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol has drawn public attention …
Read moreThe Price of the Picturesque
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 …
Read moreShape-shifting and Skin-walking
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 …
Read morePairing Wales and South America
Richard Gwyn on the central, serious, importance of make-believe to Latin American life and literature, and the gestation of his festival, Fiction Fie …
Read moreWriting the Mother Tongue
aussenraum / outside area so many languages hide beneath your trees in the secret corners of your alleys and in the well which, in winter, is b …
Read moreSwansea Automatic
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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