Search results for ""Parthian""

Late in the 1960s, before Bell was born, her father and mother visited Aberaeron, a small fishing town on the west coast of Wales. Here, her father heard a voice - which he knew to be God - directing him to minister to the Welsh. Six months after she was born in the early 1970s, they moved to Aberaeron where he took up his first curateship. Over the next eighteen years they would move to various parishes within a forty mile radius: first to Llangeler a predominantly Welsh-speaking parish in the Teifi valley, then back to Aberaeron where Bell's father became vicar, and then to a larger and more Evangelical church in Aberystwyth. This unique memoir in verse offers a series of snapshots about religion and sexuality. In verse because it's how Bell remembers: snapshots in words strung along a line, which somehow constitute a life. Snapshots of another time from now, but from a time which tells us about how Bell got here. Not the whole story, but her story. Of an English family on a mission from God, of signs and wonders in the Welsh countryside, of difference, and of faith and its loss.

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When 'Hymns and Arias' rang out at Cardiff Arms Park some fifty years ago, those great Welsh anthems 'Calon Lan' and 'Cwm Rhondda' had found a companion and the valleys of south Wales had produced a new folk hero. Max Boyce's work, with over five decades of creativity, captures the spirit and the story of the people of Wales. It also has a warmth and charm that has made his words and music resonate with a worldwide audience. From his early days touring the folk clubs and small concert halls of his native south Wales to sell-out shows at some of the world's most iconic venues, including the Albert Hall, the London Palladium and the opera houses of Sydney and Durban, Max has become an original and treasured performer whose songs and stories have become part of folk culture. His albums, including the No. 1 album We All Had Doctors' Papers and the iconic Live at Treorchy, have sold in their millions and earned him several gold discs. His greatest influence has always been the valleys of Wales, with their inherent warmth and humour, their sadness and passion, and he has the remarkable ability to heighten, to an art form, the 'hwyl' that attends his nation's national game: rugby union. Compiling - in some instances for the first time in print - the very best songs, poems and stories from across his celebrated career, Max: Hymns & Arias is the definitive selected work of a major cultural figure who, through his inimitable humour, uniquely Welsh pathos and masterful wordcraft, has defined a nation and its people for more than half a century.

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At the dawn of the nineteenth century, John Stewart Zarco lives out an inquisitive, naive childhood in his idyllic Porto community. But societal prejudices against his family’s Jewish faith shatter his innocence and even come to threaten his life. Following the tragic death of his dearest friend, it is only his unlikely bond with Midnight, an African healer and freed slave, that restores a sense of safety. But this fragile, fleeting peace is destroyed when Napoleon’s armies invade Portugal and John suffers another devastating loss – one rooted in unspeakable betrayal and authored by those closest to him. The revelation sets John on course for antebellum America, in what might ultimately prove to be a doomed quest for hope amid unspeakable cruelty and sin. Rich in historical detail and mysticism, Hunting Midnight is Richard Zimler’s mesmerising tale of deception, guilt, forgiveness and devotion, played out against a backdrop of war, slavery and religious oppression.

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Edited by Hanan Issa, Durre Shahwar and OEzgur Uyanik. "I felt the city in my muscles, my saliva. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to be in love." A young woman weaves her experience of abuse into the folklore of her ancestors. A student addresses his OCD by writing letters. A Paralympic medallist reflects upon his journey into a challenging new lifestyle. From language politics to neurodivergence, cultural heritage to sexual identity, from immigration to race, these are insights shared with great care, sincerity, and often humour. Featuring an unbound range of writers; united by their connection to Wales, but reaching freely across continents. This collection is an open invitation. It is a bringing together of previously untold perspectives: creative essays with no hard lines or prescriptive margins. No normative spotlights, only an open space to speak, and be heard. These are stories told on their own terms.

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Country Dance is a story of passion, jealousy and revenge centred around a young woman torn between the opportunities and dangers of her life who grows up in an isolated rural community on the border between England and Wales. A classic love story where the rural way of life is no idyll, but a savage and exacting battle for survival.

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From the remote forests of northern Ontario to a Neolithic burial chamber on the coast of north Wales, from a frozen lake in the Canadian wilderness to a mysterious Welsh heath, Shattercone takes the reader on a strange, compelling and sometimes heart-breaking journey through the blurry junctures that bind together landscapes and lovers. Including buried elephant bones, explorers gone astray, hidden histories, secret islands, loves found and lost, these subtly linked stories explore the curious and delicate threads that weave together places and people.

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William Henry Davies (1871–1940) was a Welsh poet and writer. He was also a traveller and adventurer, often living on his wits as a tramp and itinerant labourer. After a serious accident while attempting to board a train in eastern Canada while on the way to the Klondike Gold Fields he returned to London and began to write. He would become one of the most popular poets of his time with his work championed by both Edward Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. Famous for his prose memoir The Autobiography of a Super- tramp, he is best-known as a poet for ‘Leisure’, a hymn to living slow and having ‘time to stand and stare’. Saints and Lodgers offers an introduction to the wide range of Davies’s poetry which lies beyond his famous reputation. Here are hymns to the beauty of his native south Wales and to the natural world, poems in praise of lives lived on the margins and on the streets, drinking songs and songs of the sea. More than anything, as Newport poet Jonathan Edwards argues in his compelling introduction, Davies emerges as a poet of people, who never turns away from the suffering or the beauty of the saints and lodgers among whom he lives. Jonathan Edwards’s first collection of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. He lives in Crosskeys, near Newport, and is editor of Poetry Wales.

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In a remote Welsh village by the sea, four friends grow up together. Plain but charismatic Del is the ringleader, unstoppable, supremely confident in her ability to get her own way. Neil, shy and stuttering, and Ricky, full of rage and loneliness, are misfits at school until Del takes them under her wing. Steph is the outsider, but she too is mesmerised by Del's devil-may-care approach to life. They hang around together - mucking about in the woods, searching for treasure on the seashore, doing dares, sharing cigarettes. Then, one terrible day, the gang is broken up for good. Meeting ten years later in the now stagnating village, Neil, Ricky and Steph revisit their childhood haunts and re-live the memories that have cast a shadow over each of their lives. Del is, by turns, the beating heart at the centre of all their stories and a gaping absence. Set against the backdrop of the northern Welsh coast, and told through the voices of Neil, Ricky and Steph - the children left behind - Revenant pieces together their memories of childhoods broken by desertion, absence and death, and uncovers the secrets and betrayals of childhood friendships, with thoughtful, shocking brilliance.

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To Hear the Skylark's Song is a memoir about how Aberfan survived and eventually thrived after the terrible disaster of the 21st of October 1966, when Pantglas school took the full force of thousands of tons of colliery waste and a community lost a generation of children. It is a story about how people held a community together and created a space for each other to thrive. It is also a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful story of what it was like to grow up in a Valley's community in the 70s: a thriving place of people, shops, clubs, chapel concerts, coal mines, interwoven with gossip and stories and, of course, the annual bus trip to Barry Island. Aberfan found a way to carry on, and Huw vividly brings to life how the sense of community provided strength and comfort in the shadow of a lifetime-long grief. A community that continues to innovate and inspire.

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Eric Ngalle thought he was leaving Cameroon for a better life... Instead of arriving in Belgium to study for a degree in economics he ended up in one of the last countries he would have chosen to visit - Russia. Having seen his passport stolen, Eric endured nearly two years battling a hostile environment as an illegal immigrant while struggling with the betrayal that tore his family apart and prompted his exit. This painfully honest and often brutal account of being trapped in a subculture of deceit and crime gives a rare glimpse behind the headlines of a global concern.

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"What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since."Beside a lake in the northern Canadian wilderness, fifteen year old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely and isolated life with his father. His only neighbours are a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire, and an expert in snow. But then one summer the enigmatic and shape-shifting Eva Spiller arrives in search of the remains of her parents and together they embark on a strange and disconcerting journey of discovery. Nothing at Sitting Down Lake is quite as it seems. The forest hides ruins and mysteries; the past can never be fully understood. And as Zach and Eva make their way through this haunted landscape, they move ever closer towards an acceptance of what in the end is lost and what can truly be found.

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An incongruous ice-cream van lurches up into the Welsh hills through the hail, pursued by a boy and girl who chase it into their own dark make-believe world, and unfurl in their compelling voices a tale which ultimately breaks out of childhood and echoesacross the years. Pigeon is the tragic, occasionally hilarious and ultimately intense story of a childhood friendship and how it's torn apart, a story of guilt, silence and the loss of innocence, and a story about the kind of love which may survive it all.Mae fan hufen ia yn stryffaglu i fyny'r allt trwy'r cenllysg. Rhed bachgen a merch ar ei hol a'i dilyn i gaddug eu dychymyg. Clywir eu lleisiau cyfareddol yn adrodd stori sy'n chwalu mur plentyndod ac yn atsian ar draws y blynyddoedd.Stori am gyfeillgarwch plant a sut y bygythir y cyfeillgarwch hwnnw yw Pijin. Dyma drasiedi rymus sydd ar adegau'n eithriadol ddoniol. Fel yn y Saesneg gwreiddiol mae'r ddwy iaith yn rhan anhepgor o wead stori am euogrwydd, am golli iaith a cholli diniweidrwydd ac am y math o gariad all oresgyn hyn i gyd.

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When Hernan Cortes met the Mayans, Aztecs and other cultures of the gulf coast of Mexico in 1519, it was the first extended contact between the peoples of continental America and Europe. The Spanish found cities larger and better run than any in Europe, and pyramids greater than Egypt's. The Aztecs believed time was running down and they lived in the final age of the world. Many Spaniards believed Christ's millennium was approaching, and God's revelation of Americas had opened the final act: the conversion of the remote races of the earth. After the Day of Judgement God's experiment with man was over. The laboratory, the physical world, would be destroyed. Both cultures were acting out the last days. Halfway through researching this book John Harrison had a scan which told him he would not live to write it; he was seeing out his own days. The Aztec people were concerned with the transitory nature of worldly things; some of their rulers were revered as much for their philosophical poetry as their conquests. John Harrison follows Cortes's route along the Mexican coast and across country to modern Mexico City, home of the Aztecs.A journey within journeys to the end of time, the book becomes a meditation on time, on mortality and self, from a modern master of travel writing.

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The second of Lewis Jones' two epic industrial novels of the 1930s. Len, son of Big Jim and dynamic political organiser, takes centre stage in Lewis Jones' sequel to Cwmardy. Along his journey, he is influenced by Mary, a teacher, and the Communist Party, which becomes central to his work both underground and in union politics, and to his decision to leave and fight in the Spanish Civil War. We Live paints a graphic portrait of the casual exploitation, tragedy and violence as well as the political hope and humanity of South Wales industrial workers from the 1900s to the 1930s.

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William Henry Davies was born in a pub and learnt early in life to rely on his wits and his fists - and to drink. Around the turn of the century, when he was twenty-two, his restless spirit of adventure led him to set off for America, and he worked around the country taking casual jobs where he could, thieving and begging where he couldn't. His experiences were richly coloured by the bullies, tricksters, and fellow-adventurers he encountered - New Haven Baldy, Wee Shorty, The Indian Kid, and English Harry, to name but a few. He was thrown into prison in Michigan, beaten up in New Orleans, witnessed a lynching in Tennessee, and got drunk pretty well everywhere. A harrowing accident forced him to return to England and the seedy world of doss-houses and down-and-outs like Boozy Bob and Irish Tim. When George Bernard Shaw first read the Autobiography in manuscript, he was stunned by the raw power of its unvarnished narrative. It was his enthusiasm, expressed in the Preface, that ensured the initial success of a book now regarded as a classic.

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Family connections, unconventional friendships, love and loss: the twelve stories in this collection of new contemporary fiction by the winners of the 2022 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition present characters seeking solace, self-discovery and self-fulfilment as they navigate familiar and unfamiliar territory. Two sisters search for the last available Christmas tree while coming to terms with their mother's death; a stammering teen hitches a lift with a Welsh Elvis; a man participates in his 'endgame'; and a teacher and pupil create their very own time machine. From hillside encounters to conversations in homes, shops and on the street, these are stories about people and place, about relationships and revelations, peppered with memories and re- imaginings. These are stories where some voices are silenced and others get to sing. The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition recognises the very best unpublished short stories in English in any style by writers aged 18 or over who were born in Wales, have lived in Wales for two years or more, or are currently living in Wales. Originally established in 1991, Parthian is delighted to publish the 2022 winning stories on behalf of the Rhys Davies Trust and in association with Swansea University's Cultural Institute.

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Translated by Marta Ziemelis Narcoses (translated from the Latvian Narkozes) is a collection of fresh, powerfully feminine and open poetry, never derivative nor contrived, but inspired by Gruntmane's direct and honest personal experience. Full of life and love, joy, and pain, Narcoses is written with keen psychological insight and a courageous amount of self-awareness, to establish an intimacy and trust between poet and reader. Narcoses is part of the 'Parthian Baltic' project. The project was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

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Marius Burokas' collection for Parthian, Now I Understand, translated and selected by Rimas Uzgiris, reveals the unbreakable connection he feels with Vilnius, as well as the comfort he finds within literature: books are my/ paths/ and garden/my shelter /and clinic.

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From Rhondda heroes chasing the American dream to rioters staking a claim in their society In the Frame is a powerful alternative history of twentieth-century South Wales, offered from the personal viewpoint of cultural historian Dai Smith.

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A collection of poetry from Norman Schwenk.

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Peter Lord surveys the evolution of the visual culture of Wales from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century in this new, single-volume history.

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In Ponty is it? Daryl Leeworthy journeys from the isolation of Llanwonno to the unmarked border between the true metropolis of Wales and that southern pretender, Cardiff, and on the way learns what brings him back to his hometown every time he tries to leave and what now really keeps him there.

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Landeg White's Living in the Delta adds new poems to a selection from his nine previous collections published over a period of forty years. Ranging from the West Indies, Southern and West Africa, to Britain, Portugal and latterly the UAE, they are characterised by abundance, lucidity, variety, and mastery of form.

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The Undressed is a poetry collection inspired by a cache of antique nude photographs of women. King studied the photographs ranging from the 1840s to the 1930s and attempted to return voices to these mostly anonymous women lost to history.

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Noah, a debt collector and investigator in his late twenties, is slowly putting away enough money to get out of the murky world of solicitors, bankers, bent coppers and cheating wives for good. [...] but then comes the job that changes everything.

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The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It's about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it's about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person's life.

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Landscape and nature take centre stage in this practised collection. Here we have a bird's - or perhaps moth's - eye view of the natural world and the ways in which we interact (and often fail to interact) with it.

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A vision of contemporary Dubai from the perspective of a variety of expats from different parts of the world, telling tales of hardship and the high-life, paranoia and alienation, cruelty and love.

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A collection of poetry as you have never seen it before, these short, experimental works blur the boundary between prose and poetry.

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Whether you're a lifelong "Jack" or a recent convert to the "beautiful game", this collection of essays is an introduction to the fascinating history of Welsh Football.

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Cadillac Temple is Norman Schwnk's first collection since The More Deceived: poems about love and lovers (2005). Born and educated in the USA, he came to Wales from Sweden in the 1960's.

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Featuring research by some of established critics in the field of Welsh writing in English, this title aims to engage in an informed way both with the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing, looking towards the future and outwards towards the rest of the world.

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Tells the stories of twelve disabled women, ten from Wales and two from the West of England.

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A work by the author of "White Star" and "From Empty Harbour to White Ocean".

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Presents sixteen stories of rural Midwest America: smalltown secrets, the powerful silences that bind families, and seven shades of female friendship.

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An English translation from an acclaimed Welsh writer, this romantic fantasy novel won the 1992 Welsh National Eisteddfod Prose Medal.

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Creating a stirring collection, these poems capture the strength and fragility of the moments of lovethose instances of decision, reflection, loss, and longing."

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A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty, for through his obsessive pursuit of justice Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

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The works of poetry, prose and essays offer a snapshot of the concerns and preoccupations shared by young writers from a region with a rich literature that rarely reaches English-language readers and at the same time confirms the vitality of the bilingual Welsh literary scene.

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A reliable and clean source of water is essential for any community, so it is easy to understand how important wells were for pre-modern peoples. More complex is the mystical relationship humans have developed with these sites, which are imbued with a sacredness that predates Christianity. Holy Wells of Wexford and Pembrokeshire is a series of five chapbooks celebrating holy wells in two regions with common ancestry and history. Since at least the Bronze Age, sea travel between these two lands has meant cross-fertilisation of traditions and common names associated with wells of both regions. Of significance is the long-standing friendship between two early Christian saints: David, who became the first Bishop of St Davids; and Aidan, born in Ireland, who spent time in Wales and then founded monasteries in Ireland, including at Ferns. In Oilgate, Wexford, there is a well dedicated to David and, at Whitesands near St Davids in Pembrokeshire, there is one named after Aidan. Each of the five books approaches the subject from different perspectives and mediums, including fiction, poetry and essays as well as photographs and prints.

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From a humble background in Barry, where his father was a butcher and local politician in the formative years of the new town, Cyril Lakin studied at Oxford, survived the First World War, and went on to become a Fleet Street editor, radio presenter and war-time member of parliament. As literary editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, Lakin was at the centre of a vibrant and radical generation of writers, poets and critics, many of whom he recruited as reviewers. He gained a parliamentary seat and served in the National Government during World War II. The different worlds he inhabited, from Wales to Westminster, and across class, profession and party, were facilitated by his relaxed disposition, convivial company, and ability to cultivate influential contacts. An effective talent-spotter and catalyst for new projects, he preferred pragmatism over ideology and non-partisanship in politics: a moderate Conservative for modern times.

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Widely acclaimed for its warm humour, lyricism and honesty, as well as its accurate evocation of the 30s, this has become a classic. In this autobiographical novel, Abse interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backcloth of the times.

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Alys Morgan was admitted to hospital on the 19th of April, with an unexplained sickness which had rendered her too weak to move. The next day she was diagnosed with Covid-19 - though staff understood her symptoms as little as the virus itself. This is one woman's account of a pandemic no-one seemed prepared for - from the bed of a north-Wales hospital struggling to care for its multiplying patients. It's a story of mothers and daughters, isolation and survival, love and loss. But most of all, it's a testament to everything we owe those providing care - and comfort - on the new front line.

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A 20th anniversary edition with a foreword by peter finch cardiff cut is witty, obscene, defiant; an anarchic joycean monologue steeped in the city of cardiff. neither truth nor fiction taken from real life or what seemed for an instant

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Hymns Ancient & Modern, New & Selected Poems, brings together the best of Brookes from four books and booklets, published from the early 90s: 43 Poems, The Dresden Cantata, Book, and More Last Poems and some new editions. Brookes handles with confidence and purpose poems both as neat and revealing as a mathematical equation, and poems that trip down the page on their rhymes. His subjects are as various as the world, often funny, in all the senses of the word, always unsentimental, each carefully observed and valued, whether a noisy cafe, model boats on a lake, or a neighbour dying in a hospital bed.

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Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks explores fractured connections of self, family and home, laying bare the devastating impact of traumatisation against language and identity in its unflinching quest to communicate the brittle reality of everyday life at the edge. The destructive forces of suicide, insomnia, self-harm and abuse are given order through the creative drive of poetic forms. At the heart of this collection are a daughter's fraught relationships with her half Japanese father, who survived three years as a POW in Czechoslovakia, and a mother who grew up in National Socialist Germany, and whose unspoken traumas haunted the fabric of family life.

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Edward Thomas and Wales offers a fascinating re-evaluation of Thomas's writing. Bringing together for the first time the prose and poetry centred in Thomas's ancestral land of Wales, it explores the `Welshness' of Thomas's work and of Thomas himself.

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