Category: Opinion

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Land of Whose Fathers?

A digital project aims to map land ownership across Wales – and you can help. Chris Moss talks to Dr Sioned Hâf, creator of Who Owns Wales/Pwy Bia Cymru, in this feature-length essay

PUBLISHED ON: 01/04/21

CATEGORY: Column, Essays, Opinion

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 …

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Lest We Forget

Wanda Zyborska writes about HM Stanley, Denbigh, memorialisation and art, asking, How can we have equality without diversity in our cultural representations?

PUBLISHED ON: 28/07/20

CATEGORY: Column, Opinion

The recent actions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters tearing down statues of the slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol has drawn public attention …

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The Price of the Picturesque

The package tour was invented in Wales. In the week the ‘travel ban’ is likely to be lifted, Chris Moss calls for a reinvention of Welsh tourism after coronavirus

PUBLISHED ON: 30/06/20

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 …

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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: Column, Opinion

  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 …

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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, Reviews

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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