Search results for ""parthian""

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.

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Jeffrey Weeks has been called 'the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. Yet behind the titles and acclaim lies the story of a hugely fascinating, inspirational life - one both immersed in love and blighted by pain and loss. Growing up in a tight-knit mining community in the post-war Rhondda Valleys, Weeks knew from a young age that he was different. However, grappling with his burgeoning gayness amid this hotbed of sexual conservatism and traditional gender divisions, his initial explorations into this uniqueness led to little more than isolation and shame. Finding salvation in his studies, university brought with it a life-defining opportunity to thrive within the radical culture of late sixties and seventies London. He soon found himself at the forefront of the new gay liberation movement, and his work as its pioneering historian would spark a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition.

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Moon jellyfish live a life adrift, relying on the current to take them where they need to go. They are the ultimate survivors and one of the most successful organisms of animal life. So how do they thrive in the open ocean when they can barely swim? Rooted in her island home, Ness Owen's second collection explores what it is to subsist with whatever the tides bring in poems that journey from family to politics, womanhood and language. In the ebb and flow of an ever-changing world, starlings fall from the sky, votes are cast, a village is drowned, a petrified forest is revealed and messages wash up in seaworn bottles on the shoreline, waiting for answers that will not come.

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BERLIN, 1932 Intelligent, artistic and precocious, fourteen-year-old Sophie Riedesel dreams of nothing more than becoming an actress and spending time with her beloved Jewish neighbour, Isaac Zarco. But when her father and boyfriend become Nazi collaborators and Hitler’s meteoric rise to power gathers momentum, she is forced to lead a double life to protect those closest to her. Invited by Isaac into the Ring, a secret circle of underground activists working against the government, Sophie soon learns the ways of espionage and subterfuge. But when a series of sterilisations, murders and disappearances threatens to destroy the group, Sophie must fight to expose the traitor in their midst and save all that she loves about Germany – whatever the price. Thrilling, suspenseful and evocative, The Seventh Gate is at once a love story, a tale of fierce heroism and a horrifying study of the Nazis’ war against the disabled.

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Edited and Selected by Meena Upadhyaya and Chris Weedon Narrative editor Kirsten Lavine Foreword by Julie Morgan and Jane Hutt Introduction by Prof Terry Threadgold, previous Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University The stories of women from Wales' minority communities are seldom heard. This book comprises the life stories of 40 Black Asian Minority Ethnic women that were finalists/winners for the Ethnic Minority Welsh Women Achievement award (2011-2019). The women featured include some from long-settled, often mixed families and women from various parts of South and East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Their life experiences are a fundamental part of the history of multi-ethnic Wales. Individual stories testify both to the struggle and to the remarkable contribution that minority women have made to the many sectors of Welsh society.

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Jack Priday, down-at-heel and almost down and out, returns to his hometown towards the end of the 1970s after a decade's absence, just looking for a way to get by. His life becomes entangled with those of old friends Keith, Judith and O, and with the slow death throes of the male-dominated heavy industries that have shaped and defined the region and its people for almost two centuries. As circumstances shift around them, the principals are forced to find some understanding of them and to confront their own secret natures. From multiple viewpoints, Shifts is a slowburning, controlled and intense examination of the relationship between our inner lives, the people around us and the forces of history.

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A Wilder Wales highlights the astonishing transformation of Wales from a poor rural backwater to the crucible of the industrial revolution and offers readers an insight into the ways in which outsiders viewed the land and its people. A fine gift book for discerning travellers and tourists wanting to take words from Wales home. “Even Hannibal himself wou’d have found it impossible to have march’d his army over Snowden” Daniel de Foe, A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain... 1724

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Edited with an introduction by Daniel Hughes 'A restless shape-shifter from the mysterious Welsh Marches, Heseltine was as elusive in his idiosyncratic writing as in his extraordinary globetrotting life. It is good to have his work briefly pinned down in this groundbreaking collection for closer inspection.' - Professor M.Wynn Thomas Cariad County: a place of anarchy and farce, of the grotesque and the slapstick, of tragedy and violent comedy, where the local hunt is disrupted by a camel-riding hero, where the town hall burns down as the town cheers, a place haunted by grotesque revenants from the First World War. This is the world of Nigel Heseltine's short stories, fantastic fictions which lampoon and lament the slow decline of the once-powerful squires and landowners of mid-Wales, the very Montgomeryshire of which Heseltine (1916-1995) formed a part. Nigel Heseltine is a long-neglected member of Wales's 'Golden Generation' of English-language short story writers which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Glyn Jones. His stories appeared alongside theirs in major magazines such as English Story and Penguin New Writing in the 1930s and 1940s. This volume re-prints for the first time since their initial publication the stories published in Heseltine's Tales of the Squirearchy (1946), alongside a substantial number of stories never previously collected. Ranging from the starkly surreal to the subtly moving, these tales reveal Nigel Heseltine as a singularly talented writer, the equal of his better-known contemporaries.

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Bound together by blood ties, Martha, Jack and Shanco live on a farm in west Wales where their lives unfold in their eerie half- presence of their dead parents. Glimmers of understanding punctuate their relationship with one another, but unspoken animosity seems to be the most potent ingredient. A lament for the prizes and the price of nurturing a landscape: an antidote for anyone impatient with those who choose to stay in one place.

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The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with a force like a blow that leaves you winded. The night lurched and seemed to swoop suddenly down. The boy still lay on his back, but when I sat up, gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see what had startled me. 'It's all right,' I said, though it wasn't. It is the summer of 1954. Four young men, on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember. A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold. "A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the reader on a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted, wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments of a remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixty years' bitter hindsight." - Richard Gwyn Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.

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When the author is given a small package, containing letters and papers relating to his grandfather's brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War, it leads him on an extended personal journey. An exploration of history, imagination and the process of memory, shifting imperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records. In his first prose work Lewis reveals a rare and consummate literary talent. Deeply rooted in his Welsh identity, this young writer locates his own and his family's experience within the wider European world in a thoughtful, mature and highly original book.

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It is 1958: Isolde Dahl is a young teacher who goes to work in a British school on the shores of Lake Ploen in north-west Germany. She is returning to a country she fled as a child refugee with her mother, Renate. Her father has disappeared into the chaos of a continent ravaged by war. Isolde has grown up in a Wales both strange and familiar. 1945, Lake Ploen. Michael Quantz is an officer in what is left of a shattered German military command as they stage a last chaotic stand before the Allied armies in the final days of the World War II. Everyone has secrets. Michael wants to survive: his wife and son may still be alive. He will hide, change, become a teacher of music. As Isolde and Michael meet on the shores of a German lake, the choices they have made and the stories they have told will change their lives again.

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This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written by an acclaimed biographical historian, the essays not only challenge expectations about how women’s lives were lived in the last two centuries, they also explore different ways of approaching biographical writing and understanding, as well as raising issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland and internationally. Lady Rhondda and Edith Picton-Turbervill championed women’s equality at the centre of power in Westminster, whilst Myvanwy and Olwen Rhŷs saw education as the key to change. Women’s suffrage played a prominent part in the lives of these women and was especially central to Margaret Wynne Nevinson’s thinking, writing and actions. The intelligence, determination and grit of these women is revealed through their stirring stories. Taken together, the essays critically investigate the challenges, setbacks and hard-won achievements of feisty women who rocked the boat over a period of 150 years.

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With a foreword by Dr. Becky Munford Part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to be human. Moving from 1970 to the present day, Deborah Kay Davies relates the history of Grace and Tamar, their volatile childhood, disruptive coming-of-age and dubious maturity. The book is part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to become human. Dr. Becky Munford is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she teaches and researches modern and contemporary women’s writing, spectrality, fashion and dress history (especially trousers). She is the author of Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic (2013) and co-author of Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (2013). She is currently writing a book on women and trousers.

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poems about being sick and being in love. finding out you’ve got a serious illness like multiple sclerosis is a bit like falling in love. you are never quite the same again. when you get your heartbroken, it’s like getting the news that you’re ill. It’s a process of grief and you think your life is over and that you will never move on, but you do. alternatively, when you become ill and when you fall in love, you are just simply fucked.

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Seven Days is a story of adventure and spirituality as father and son travel the "Rue du Bonjour" across the pilgrim route of the high Pyrenees.It is a journey with a writer grappling with some of the questions of modern life, his love for the mountains, his beliefs and aspirations and examples set both by his father and the enigmatic fellow traveller they meet in a remote auberge who comes to symbolise and shadow their sojourn, a man he nicknames Hemingway, although he is neither a writer nor an American.A wonderfully engaging work of travel, discovery, and contemplation by an exciting new voice.

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Travel to the revolutionary closing years of 18th century England. Meet Jack Cockshutt, arsonist by trade, returning to rescue his victims and profit from their relief, finding the woman who just might save him. Meet the beauty who castigates her customers with passages from Paine's Rights of Man; the boy who raises the tricolour on the White Tower; the labourer contracted to spend seven years locked up beneath a dilettante's country house. Meet Lappish women. Glimpse the picnic party of the Ottoman ambassador. A stunning new voice emerges with these strange and gemlike stories.

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Flame and Slag is Ron Berry's masterpiece. It is a richly complex novel which uses the fictional sieve of Caib Colliery and the village of Daren to give meaning to the kaleidoscopic history of all the South Wales valleys in the last century. The unspeakable horror of Aberfan in 1966 was the terrible nemesis of that now lost world, and as re-imagined in this remarkable 1968 novel is the cusp time in the intertwined lives of the lovers, Rees Stevens and Ellen Vaughan, and of Ellen's father, John whose journal is the book-within-a book which Rees must discover and interpret if all the fires of living on are not to fall into cold ash.

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From the author of the celebrated Great War memoir

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A story of time slipping, desire just out of reach, like memories lost

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Bill Rees has been living in the south of France for ten years working as an itinerant bookseller in Montpellier. The one thing he misses about England is table tennis. Then he sees an advert to join a club for “experienced players only” and veterans. He starts training immediately, he’s forty and not as fit as he used to be but Bill Rees is returning to the game à la carte. Covering one Sunday tournament in the depths of Languedoc when his team bids to make the National Finals, Bill Rees produces a deeply felt and deeply funny homage to the beautiful game of ping-pong. Rees shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, fast (especially when his club mate Alain is at the table), consuming. All of which is revealed from the perspective of a Brit playing in French amateur leagues. Conveyed is the pain of competition, the agony of losing and the joys of victory. The reader is also regaled with a Zen-like insight into the sport. For all those athletes who dream of glory being around the corner and never too late. Contains illustrations by the Monpellier based artist Beachy.

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Cheval 9 contains a selection of the best work submitted this year to the Terry Hetherington Award, which has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales.

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Cheval 7 presents a selection of the writing submitted by the talented young entrants to this year's Terry Hetherington Award, and includes new work by previous winners.Some of these writers are appearing in print for the first time; others have already begun to make their mark on the literary scene.

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A coming of age late tale as a jaded PR man seeks meaning and love in his life and addresses past, present and future along with a misfit cast of mystics, tramps, bar flies and copywriters.

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A young man's quest for beauty through literature, love, drugs and dreams becomes a mystical, lyrical classic from the father of supernatural horror. There is a foreword by Catherine Fisher one of whose acclaimed "Oracle" trilogy was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and is an international bestseller translated into over 20 languages. Originally published in 1907, it is widely regarded as Machen's finest lyrical work.

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Hereditation tells the story of the Sloane family. Living in New York in the middle of the 20th Century, brothers Erwin and Maynard share their brownstone Harlem house with their mother, a perpetually ill woman who has recently suffered the indignity of being abandoned by her philandering husband, Ezra.

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1949: Egypt's struggle against its British occupiers moves towards crisis; Israel declares its statehood, driving out the Arabs; Joe Roberts, an RAF sergeant, his wife Ailsa and daughter, Nia, leave Wales for Egypt.

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Beca Lewis was so hoping for the fluffy toy pony she had seen in the shop window. But on her birthday there was only an envelope from her parents on the table. She didn't know that she would soon be hugging her own real live pony. Siani the Shetland is black and furry, with quite a mind of her own. To Beca she is a dream come true.

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Chronicles the poet's experience of being diagnosed with prostrate cancer, of undergoing surgery and then of entering recovery. This collection of poems summarises how many people feel towards a disease which is regarded with dread. It contains material, which is unsettling yet informative and thought provoking.

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Insightful and informative, this volume of essays offers a fresh outlook and critical appraisal of contemporary plays.

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Tracy is a kleptomaniac and a compulsive liar. A lost soul, she drifts fecklessly about, sponging off her friends with a high turnover of menial jobs as she searches for Anita. Tracy's thinks that if Anita's disappeared out of her life, then she must have disappeared out of this world, and that means detective work.

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In these linked short stories Sonia Edwards' characters spin out their interwoven lives; the shifting perspective of each story serving to illuminate another facet of truth and experience.

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The selected stories of one of Wales's leading writers, "Outside Paradise" is a testament to women of all ages. Sometimes bright and uplifting, sometimes dark and moving, Sian James's work celebrates life.

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This publication is a collection of poems, often provocative, sometimes funny. The words trace a development from ferocious performance poetry to an increasingly bittersweet seam of writing, challenging and honest.

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Jo is a young woman with a little girl. Life is a council estate and a married man who loves her. She begins as an intelligent single mother determined to get out of the poverty trap, but after her married lover gets her pregnant and leaves, she experiences a descent through love into hell.

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A romance that tells the story of a refugee named Gregor who has to find his way through a world of half-real and half-fantastic territories in a quest for his past and future. The book has won the National Eisteddfod Prose Medal as well as the BBC Wales Writer of the Year Award.

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Joe England explores the possible constitutional meltdown of a divided UK and its consequences, reflecting on Wales' position as the poorest nation of all. As a constitutional crisis looms, this book contemplates a reimagined Wales and what that would mean for its people.

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Feral Monster follows Jax and her noisy, opinionated brain as they navigate love, identity, class and family. Mashing up grime, R&B, soul, pop and rap, the soundtrack takes us from the high highs to low lows of the hormonal rollercoaster ofadolescence.

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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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The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018) including work by John Sam Jones, Sian James, Rhys Davies, Deborah Kay Davies, Aled Islwyn, and Kate North. New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. An accessible but scholarly introduction places the writers and their stories in their historical and literary contexts. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.

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"Dear Adolf. Don't start anything. It's the Coal Trip." The dark clouds of war are gathering over Europe yet the inhabitants of the south Wales town of Penddawn have other things on their minds. There's rugby, of course, and religion, too, not to mention work, or the lack of it. Not to mention the annual trip to Tenby, and a chance to get sand in your shoes, and forget about both poverty and Hitler. But for one small boy the worlds of warfare and welfare mean very little: his mind is crammed full of books and the wonders they contain: he can dream of little else... The Last Coal Trip to Tenby is drenched in the warm sun of nostalgia, a heartwarming tale of abiding friendships, and a portrait of a community that's as close knit as an old cardigan. It's a novel written with vim and vigour and oodles of good humour, about a cast of endearing characters who will stay in the mind.

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The Crossing bridges the past and the present and connects Wales with America, as it tells of coal owners and coal workers in the age of great transatlantic liners and fortunes to be made. At its heart is a father’s search for his daughter in Welsh valleys no longer proud, where creaming off regeneration grants has replaced coal mining as a way of life and development parks now stand where once did pit head wheels. It follows a lifetime’s search for lost love, the sinking of a great ship in a great war, misplaced family and forlorn hopes where individual lives are shaped and fated in the shadow of modernity and the cold hand of progress. This brave, bold and challenging work conjures a vivid cast of characters into being and offering – with ready vim and ample vigour – their compelling, complex and ultimately telling story.

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This insightful and revealing collection of essays focuses on seven Welsh women who, in a range of imaginative ways, resisted the status quo in Wales, England and beyond during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written by an acclaimed biographical historian, the essays not only challenge expectations about how women's lives were lived in the last two centuries, they also explore different ways of approaching biographical writing and understanding, as well as raising issues of gender and nationality. From the pioneer doctor and champion of progressive causes, Frances Hoggan, to the irrepressible twentieth-century novelist Menna Gallie, these women spoke out for what they believed in, and sometimes they paid the price. Although proud of their Welsh identity, they articulated it in a variety of ways, and each spent most of their adult lives outside Wales. They became familiar, and often controversial voices, on the page and platform in London, Oxford, Northern Ireland and internationally. Lady Rhondda and Edith Picton-Turbervill championed women's equality at the centre of power in Westminster, whilst Myvanwy and Olwen Rhys saw education as the key to change. Women's suffrage played a prominent part in the lives of these women and was especially central to Margaret Wynne Nevinson's thinking, writing and actions. The intelligence, determination and grit of these women is revealed through their stirring stories. Taken together, the essays critically investigate the challenges, setbacks and hard-won achievements of feisty women who rocked the boat over a period of 150 years.

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A remarkable new selection in translation from the preeminent Turkish poet, Haydar Ergulen. The poems have been translated by a team of 13 translators, who include the co-editors of the book.

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