Search results for ""Author Owen Sheers""

Winner of Wales Book of the Year Pink Mist is a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan. School friends still in their teens, Arthur, Hads and Taff each have their own reasons for enlisting. Within a short space of time they return to the women in their lives (a mother, a wife, a girlfriend), all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of their service. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity and emotional intensity, Pink Mist uses everyday yet heightened speech to excavate the human cost of modern warfare. Drawing upon interviews with soldiers and their families, as well as ancient texts such as the medieval Welsh poem Y Gododdin, it is the first extended lyric narrative to emerge from the devastating conflict in Afghanistan.

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Unicorns, Almost portrays the short life of World War II poet Keith Douglas, from his childhood through four engagements to his fighting in the Western desert, his accelerated education as a poet and his early death three days after the Normandy D-Day landings at the age of twenty-four. It is the story of his Faustian pact with a war that would nurture his unique poetic voice before taking it away. It is also the story of his desperate race to see his poems in print.Widely recognised as the finest poet of World War Two, Keith Douglas was championed by Ted Hughes as an important influence. Hughes wrote the introduction to Douglas's Collected Poems, published by Faber.Unicorns, Almost by Owen Sheers opened at The Swan Hotel, Hay-on-Wye, in May 2018.

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In 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. Poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power. This is a portrait not just of what happened, but also of what was lost. What was Aberfan like in 1966? What were the interests of the people, the social life, the sporting obsessions, the bands of the day? What was the deeper history of the place? Why had it become the mining village it was, and what had it been before the discovery of coal under its soil? Perhaps most significantly: what is Aberfan like today? The Green Hollow is a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance; a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation. It is also a story known along generational rather than geographic borders. Based on the BBC One production,

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Resistance opens in 1944, as the women of a small Welsh farming community wake one morning to find that their husbands have gone. Soon after that a German patrol arrives in their valley. In his hugely anticipated debut novel, Owen Sheers has produced a beautifully imagined and powerfully moving story of love and loss.

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After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London to start again. Living on a quiet street in Hampstead, he develops a close bond with the Nelson family next door: Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters.The friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a devastating event changes all their lives, and Michael finds himself bearing the burden of grief and a terrible secret.

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Introduced and selected by the poet-presenter Owen Sheers, A Poet's Guide to Britain is a major poetry anthology in its own right.Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, and our land. Under the headings of six varieties of British landscape - London and Cities, Villages and Towns, Mountains and Moorland, Islands, Woods and Forest, and Coast and Sea - he has collected poems that evoke qualities of the land, city and sea and have become part of the way we see these landscapes. The anthology follows a similar format to the BBC series, while also supplementing the poems included in the programme with his own personal favourites.

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'Should be made compulsory reading . . . If it were up to me this clear-sighted yet emotionally charged hymn to the NHS would be added to the curriculum in every high school from Land's End to John O'Groats with immediate effect.' i newspaper July 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service Act. To Provide All People is the intimate story of the NHS in British society today, written by novelist, poet and dramatist Owen Sheers. Depicting 24 hours, with a regional hospital at the centre of the action, the poem charts an emotional and philosophical map of the NHS against the personal experiences that lie at its heart; from patients to surgeons, porters to midwives. This is a world of transformative pains, triumphs, losses and celebrations and joins us all in our universal experiences of health and sickness, birth and death, regardless of race, gender or wealth.Informed by over seventy hours of interviews, the work is punctuated with the historical narrative of the birth of the NHS Act. To Provide All People was filmed by Vox Pictures/BBC Wales.

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This paperback edition has been fully updated to include the 2013 Six Nations and the British and Irish Lions Tour.What does rugby mean to Wales? Where does the heart of Welsh rugby lie? In Calon, Owen Sheers takes a personal journey into a sport that defines a nation. Drawing on interviews and unprecedented access with players and WRU coaching staff, Calon presents an intimate portrait of a national team in the very best tradition of literary sports writing. At the 2011 Rugby World Cup a young Welsh side captained by the 22-year-old Sam Warburton, captured the imagination of the rugby-watching world. Exhibiting the grit and brilliance of generations past, an ill-fated semi-final ended in heartbreak. But a fledgling squad playing with the familiarity of brothers had sent out an electrifying message of hope: could this be a third golden generation of Welsh rugby? It was with this question hanging in the air that Owen Sheers took up his position as Writer in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union. Calon is the document of a year spent at the heart of Welsh rugby; the inside story of a 6 Nations campaign that galvanised a nation and ended in Grand Slam success for the third time in 8 years.

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When Owen Sheers discovers a book in his father's study he stumbles upon the life of an obscure relative: Arthur Cripps, lyric poet and maverick missionary to Rhodesia. Compelled by the description of Cripps' extraordinary life in Africa, Sheers embarks on a journey through contemporary Zimbabwe in an attempt to better understand his ancestor's devotion to the country and its people and the dramatic, often bloody, differences that echo across the years.

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In 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. Poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power. This is a portrait not just of what happened, but also of what was lost. What was Aberfan like in 1966? What were the interests of the people, the social life, the sporting obsessions, the bands of the day? What was the deeper history of the place? Why had it become the mining village it was, and what had it been before the discovery of coal under its soil? Perhaps most significantly: what is Aberfan like today? The Green Hollow is a historical story with a deeply urgent contemporary resonance; a story of what can happen when a community is run by a corporation. It is also a story known along generational rather than geographic borders. Based on the BBC One production, The Green Hollow is a beautifully rendered picture of a time and place - and a life-altering event whose effects are irrevocable.

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A beautiful, lyrical story of a little boy and his two best friends, told in enchanting verse by renowned poet Owen Sheers and magnificently illustrated by award-winning artist Helen Stephens.Poet Owen Sheers and award-winning illustrator Helen Stephens have beautifully imagined the story of a little boy named Drew who sets off on an adventure with his best friends, Bunny and Moo. As the three fly around the world on a magic rug, powered by the friendship they share, they run into pirates and trouble on the dark sea. Can the three best friends find what they need to return home?

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'"For years afterwards the farmers found them - the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades." So run the blunt, grimly beautiful opening lines of the Welsh poet Owen Sheers's elegy for the men, 4,000 of them from the 38th (Welsh) Division, who were killed or wounded in the Battle of Mametz Wood in July 1916. Sheers revisits that chapter of carnage in a stirring, sprawling promenade show. He draws on the writings of two survivors in particular. One is the poet David Jones whose fractured, enervated, modernist response to his war-time experiences, In Parenthesis, was hailed as a "work of genius" by TS Eliot. The other key influence is the writer Llewelyn Wyn Griffith. driven to wondering how the sun "could shine on this mad cruelty and on the quiet peace of an upland tarn near Snowdon"... We end up in dark woods and a place of numb desolation, bombarded by words that pierce the heart and vignettes that capture the stomach-churning sacrifice. The finest commemoration of the First World War centenary I've seen to-date, this deserves a much longer life.' Dominic Cavendish, Daily TelegraphMametz by Owen Sheers was premiered by National Theatre Wales in June 2014. It is one of the set plays on WJEC's A level Drama specification. This dual edition combines the original English-language play with a Welsh-language translation by Ceri Wyn Jones, one of Wales's most eminent poets.

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