Search results for ""Parthian""

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Clifford Guard was born in 1923, in the South Wales city of Swansea, into a life of abject poverty. By age 15, he sought escape through joining the merchant navy, and acted on an imperative from his father to reach America where he could forge a different future. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the US Army’s 3rd Armored Division, where he was nicknamed `Limey’ by two friends he’d endure battle with—Trix and The Greek. From the desolation of Omaha Beach to the Battle of the Bulge, they spent the next 11 months dodging gunfire, disarming landmines and liberating towns as they drove the Nazi Army from France. GI Limey is a story about the bond that keeps soldiers together, through the danger of combat and the decades after. In this honest account, Clifford Guard examines how war shaped his identity, one defined by two allied countries an ocean apart.

Read more less

"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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Alfonz Trnovsky, a genial and respected general practitioner in Breany, a small (fictitious) town in western Slovakia, spent his whole life pretending to be radiantly happy and contented, while the reality was quite different. He turned a deaf ear to his conscience as the 20th century hurtled by: four political regimes, the Holocaust, the political trials of the 1950s, the secret police before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia...and the women he loved. But whose are the bones his son accidentally stumbles on buried in the garden? As he sets out to unravel this mystery, the son discovers other skeletons in his father's cupboard. His quest includes a detour to the Prado in Madrid, where the father's favourite Goya paintings, the Black Series, are now exhibited after being removed from the walls of its original location, known as the Casa del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man).

Read more less

Ausra Kaziliunaite's poetry has been described as `post-avant-garde'; she is unafraid to shock readers with her surreal, ugly-beautiful imagery, alternative form, and regular resistance to the rigidity of social norms. In The Moon is a Pill, a collection of the best of Ausra's poetry, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, the reader discovers the extent of the poet's social engagement, mixed with a swirl of psychedelia through an existential lens. As she walks around her city, questioning God, stalked by an abandoned stuffed bird, finding a grubby child in an egg, searching for answers in bus stops and windows, her writing is intimate and personal, yet never reassuring, never fluffy, and often with a quiet nod to the complex political past of her country: who can stop you from writing what you want?/ we must understand that his times were those of censorship/ we now live in a greenhouse like some kind of tomato... from `Freedom'. The Moon is a Pill is part of the Parthian Baltic project which will be launched on time for the London Book Fair 2018. The poetry collections were launched at the Wheatsheaf Parthian Poetry Festival in April 2018.

Read more less

New Baltic Poetry is a collection celebrating the diversity of writing from the three Baltic countries; Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Six of the most talented poets from each country are translated and published in English, in many cases for the first time, providing a taste of the fresh, dynamic literary scene in the contemporary Baltic states.This collection includes poetry by Benediktas Janusevicius, Antanas A. Jonynas, Giedre Kazlauskaite, Indrek Hirv, Helena Laks, Mats Traat, Kai Aareleid, and others. It was launched at the Parthian poetry festival at the Wheatsheaf and the London Book Fair 2018 (focus region: Baltics).

Read more less

EDITED BY ELAINE CANNING INTRODUCED BY JULIA BELL A collection of new contemporary short stories by Welsh writers, comprising twelve diverse stories about human relationships between people and places, representing the winners of the 2021 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition. Including short biographical notes on the authors and an introduction by Guest Judge Julia Bell, a writer and Course Director of the MA Creative Writing at Birbeck, University of London The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition is a distinguished national writing competition for writers born or living in Wales. Originally established in 1991, Parthian is delighted to publish the 2021 winning stories on behalf of the Rhys Davies Trust and in association with Swansea University's Cultural Institute. Previous winners of the prize have included Leonora Brito, Tristan Hughes and Kate Hamer.

Read more less

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).

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

One of the great novel sequences of the British working-class people framed in the valleys and coal-mining villages of south Wales in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Read more less

The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow's Little Universe are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature's ever-present rhythms.

Read more less

Dead birds fall from the sky, an octopus lies stranded on a beach, and a lost shoe becomes a public shrine ... Untethered, Philippa Holloway's first collection of short stories, provides an unflinching glimpse of daily life interrupted by unexpected events.

Read more less

A music scholar makes an unlikely friend in a retired sea captain. In the trenches in WW1 France, a soldier befriends a young Tommy before they both go over the top. A poet uses sumptuous imagery to take us on a journey from summer to autumn.

Read more less

Stories in The Missing Woman circle around women who are either literally missing or who are missing some metaphorical piece of themselves. Burns asks questions about balance - safety with adventure - dreams with practicality - grief with joy - and challenges the reader to take a journey, make choices...

Read more less

Wiltshire 1860: One year after Darwin's explosive publication of The Origin of Species, sisters Anna and Beatrice Pentecost awaken to a world shattered by science, radicalism and the stirrings of feminist rebellion; a world of charismatic religious movements, Spiritualist seances, bitter loss and medical trauma.

Read more less

Dream On is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living.

Read more less

Tapestry of a Desert Nomad brings together a selection of amateur naturalist and austringer Eric Morrisey's reflections -on flora and fauna, his own roots in the Welsh Valleys, and world events...

Read more less

A serial killer is on the loose in a sleepy, Welsh seaside town. The year is 1947 and three young men have recently been demobbed. They share the favours of Lilian Ridetski, who runs more than a high class hair salon in the town. When she and others are found brutally strangled, suspicion falls on all of her customers.

Read more less

Disappearances, displacements, separations: Anna Lewis's startling first collection is populated with characters who move through the liminal space between departure and arrival.

Read more less

It all begins in a small town in Belgium on the morning of the festival of St. Woelfred. There are dead fish scattered everywhere, blown in by the wind. Are the fish a sign from the saint or a trick played by Contexture, the dance group who once got naked at the Vatican? The lives of six people who live in the town are about to be changed forever

Read more less

A collection of short stories and poetry by twelve writers from around the world on the theme 'After Dark'.

Read more less

Intends to translate the mystery of Chimera into poetry and short fiction from experienced women writers. From the disgruntled serpent in the Garden of Eden to the reaches of outer space, from the bright lights of Hollywood to the coast of Kenya, this title features contributions that present an intrinsic vision of the writer's imagination.

Read more less

Twenty-first century women have it all. We can do what we want, when we want and with whom we want. Can't we? This book is a collection of life stories by women in their 20s to 70s. It is about how we live: our desires, discontents, ambitions and commitments.

Read more less

Features poems about settling, building and planting in a country where the author is a stranger. His chosen forms - lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium - point to an engagement with British tradition.

Read more less

Features poetry of ten poets, each with an American background and an active, creative engagement with Wales. This title deals with the 'matter of Wales' and the 'matter' of being Welsh-American, developed through divergent poetics and perspectives. It features Jon Dressel, Denise Lever, William Greenway, and William Virgil Davies.

Read more less

Presents a comic drama, where four international experts converge at a luxurious Cardiff hotel to each bid to save a language on the verge of extinction. As personalities clash and opposites attract, the decision on which language should be saved becomes impossible to make.

Read more less

A collection of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography, this volume reflects the Cardiff-born author's unique style and use of language as he deals with themes such as war, hijacking and suicide, and drugs and pop music.

Read more less

This volume includes the plays Little Sister, Giant Steps, and Killing Kangaroos."

Read more less

Men Alone is a meditative vision from a unique voice that explores the many often confounding permutations of modern masculinity

Read more less

When a local common is threatened with development, one poet explores its secrets, discovering extraordinary natural treasures and wonderful people fighting to defend them. Can they save this uncommon common?

Read more less

This collection brings together leading voices from female writers, artists, commentators and academics to reflect on how devolution has affected them and altered our political and social landscapes. Here,a series of creative and personal responses explore the true impact of devolution on the lives of women living and working in Wales.

Read more less

Set in Zimbabwe during the early 2000s, amidst a backdrop of political turmoil, Fox Bites is a dark coming-of-age horror fantasy about pain, loneliness, and stepping back from the abyss.

Read more less

Texts from Gorwelion will be made available as digital contributions to events at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties COP26 in Glasgow, 1-12 November 2021, representing voices from the UK and India in uniting the world to tackle climate change, where the book will also be launched and available to buy. * Produced in collaboration with Sustainable Wales/ Cymru Gynaliadwy Gorwelion follows on from Sustainable Wales' initial project 'Our Square Mile', created to help us imagine the future.

Read more less

These sensual stories by prize-winning author John Sam Jones reveal lucid prose and complex lives. Moving through city steam rooms, rugged North Wales mountains and estuaries facing other places. Risky sex, new romance and easy understanding, a mortgage on a semi or keeping a lid on it all for the sake family, status and belief...

Read more less

Gwyn Thomas was born, the last of twelve children, into a Rhondda mining family in 1913. After a childhood marked by the strikes of the 1920s, he went off to study Spanish at Oxford University and in Madrid, where he met the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and witnessed the turmoil which would lead to the Spanish Civil War. On his return, amidst the economic mire of the 1930s and his own burgeoning teaching career in Barry in the 1940s, he picked up his pen and began to write. For more than forty years, until his death in 1981, as novelist, screenwriter, master of the short story, and prizewinning playwright, Gwyn Thomas delivered compelling and comedic portraits of his world of South Wales. His creative genius earned enduring fame on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the European Cold War divide. As a provocative and insightful broadcaster, he embraced the possibilities of radio and television, whilst leaving his hosts and guests alike in fits of knowing laughter. This landmark biography, enriched with unrivalled access to private papers and international archives, tells the remarkable story of one of modern Wales's greatest literary voices.

Read more less

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine is an honest and absorbing memoir from a man who has emerged as one of Wales’s major cultural figures. Boyd Clack is a man of many talents: a writer, actor, singer, musician, enthusiast, and with this first book picks apart a challenging upbringing in Tonyrefail, his wanderings to Australia, Amsterdam and London, and his experimentation as a young man with drink and drugs and love. This is Boyd’s story, told with candour and perception and skill that will absorb anyone interested in what it was to be young and Welsh – and are now older and maybe a little wiser. ‘Boyd is a brilliant actor and writer, truly unique, a genius by any definition of the word.’ – Rhys Ifans ‘I love Boyd’s unique take on life.’ – Rob Brydon “Awesome and hilarious... I cannot recommend this moving, truthful, funny and endearing roller coaster of a ride enough.” – Eve Myles

Read more less

A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew-up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social sciences.

Read more less