Library of Wales News

  • Report on The Raymond Williams Collection published

     

    The Raymond Williams Collection: A Report represents the culmination of long endeavour to bring to view unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, letters, diaries and papers that the academic writer and novelist Raymond Williams left in part discarded, often neglected.

    The Collection itself is held in the Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University, and has been catalogued courtesy of funding from the Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust. The papers of the renowned cultural critic and writer Raymond Williams (1921-1988) range from the creative works of his childhood through his time at Cambridge and World War Two, to his later academic life. The Collection reveals the development of this leading intellectual figure.

    The work of bringing the Collection to hand has been completed by numerous people, some of whom appear in this report. The Collection is now open to view in Swansea, and accessible by means of online catalogue. Now, with these more personal materials available, it becomes possible to better understand the life and how to build on the work of Raymond Williams.

    This report carries an account of how the Collection came to be, a description of its contents and projects taking on from where Raymond left off, and practical details of access and content. If it encourages use of the Collection, then it will have succeeded; however the Report also makes for an interesting read.

    The Richard Burton Archives: the home of Swansea University's archive collections are situated in the Library & Information Centre, building 7 on the Campus Map, and are open to all.

    The Raymond Williams Collection: A Report is available to buy from the Parthian bookshop, http://www.parthianbooks.com/content/raymond-williams-collection-report priced at £5.00.

  • Dannie Abse has been awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours list

     

    Parthian Books and the Library of Wales would like to congratulate Dannie Abse on being awarded a CBE in recognition of his outstanding services to poetry and literature in this year's New Year Honours list.

     

    Hear Dannie speak about receiving the award on the BBC Wales website.

     

    We recently launched the poet and playwright's superb updated autobiography Goodbye Twentieth Century as part of our Library of Wales series.

  • The Politics of Fiction: Labour politician and activist Kim Howells talks to Dai Smith about The Volunteers at Chapter Arts Centre

    Labour politician and activist Kim Howells talks to writer, editor and chair of the Arts Council of Wales Dai Smith about The Volunteers  by Raymond Williams, now republished in The Library of Wales series.

    The Volunteers is a political thriller set in a future Wales where the political agenda is controlled by the media organisation Insatel and starts with the assassination of a Welsh Office Minister in the grounds of St Fagans.

    8pm, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Entry: £5. Followed by Library of Wales launch reception in Upper Gallery.

     

  • Association of Welsh Writing in English Conference 2012

     

     

    Performing Wales: Theatre, Art, Identities

     

     

    The Association of Welsh Writing in Englishinvites submissions for conference presentations and performances for its twenty-fourth annual conference, which is to be held at Gregynog Hall, Newtown, between 30 March and 1 April 2012.

     

    Questions around performance permeate notions of identity and culture in Wales in fundamental ways. The most often-quoted passage in Gwyn A. Williams’s When was Wales? (1984) already gestures towards an understanding of identity as socially and culturally constructed. Williams writes that “[t]he Welsh as a people have lived by making and remaking themselves in generation after generation, usually against the odds, usually within a British context. Wales is an artefact which the Welsh produce. If they want to. It requires an act of choice.” Or, as Bron, one of the characters in Ed Thomas’s play Gas Station Angel (1998) has it: “to be Welsh at the end of the 20th century you got to have imagination.” A decade into the 21st century, Wales is now widely performed as a multiplicity of such imaginings, for example in the two national theatres in Wales.

     

    This conference asks how identities in Wales have been constructed and contested in and through performance, in the past and in the present. We are adopting a deliberately broad definition of performance. We would particularly like to encourage paper submissions on drama and theatre, but we are also interested in non-text-based performance, performance art, performance poetry, the performativity and performance of identity in cultural contexts etc. We would like to encourage submissions of academic conference papers as well as creative performances. All submissions should, however, focus on an aspect of Welsh writing in English or Welsh culture mediated through the English language. Comparative approaches are encouraged.

     

    We would like to receive papers dealing with topics such as (but not limited to):

    - Performing cultural, racial, gender or sexual identities in Wales
    - Performing Welshness in global or transnational contexts
    - Mediated performances of Welshness – Wales in the media
    - Historical performances of Welshness – performance of history in Wales
    - National theatres and shifting conceptions of identity
    - Performing place in Wales
    - Re-enacting cultural pasts in the context of museums and heritage and beyond
    - Comparative approaches to Welsh drama in English
    - Postdramatic Theatre in a Welsh context
    - The National Drama Movement(s)
    - Translating texts – translating identities
    - Participation and Relation: Performances of Wales and their audiences
    - Community theatres

     

    Please submit a brief abstract (ca. 300 words) and a biography (50 words) to Dr Alyce von Rothkirch, Department of Adult Continuing Education, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, a.v.von.rothkirch@swansea.ac.uk and to Dr Heike Roms, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth SY23 3AJ, hhp@aber.ac.uk. [Please send your proposal to both convenors.] The deadline for submissions is 15 November 2011.

     

     

    Please let us know which category your paper/presentation falls under: academic paper (20 mins), short presentation/performance (20 mins) or long presentation/performance (45 mins). Presentations/performances will be held in seminar rooms, so please keep them as simple as possible. A list of technical requirements is essential.
     

  • Brenda Chamberlain: Postcard from Hydra

    When the man she was having a love affair with was charged with murder of a tourist Brenda Chamberlain fled to a convent on the far side of the island of Hydra. It is one of the incidents caught in her record of seven years of island life in the 1950s now republished in the Library of Wales series.

    Writer and publisher Lewis Davies climbs the island paths.

     


    This morning I climbed the track up mountain to the convent. On the way up I stopped to talk to a man labouring on the construction of a new paved footpath up through the pines. He has worked in London in a restaurant while studying art at Goldsmiths College . He has work in a gallery in Piraeus but not here in Hydra. “It is difficult here, difficult to make a living, which is why I’m building this path.” He offers to show me some of his work. I am to meet him in his cousin’s bar this evening. “I will show you some work.”

     

    The afternoon is cooling now and thick clouds rise above the mountains of the Peloponnese to the west. It is still warm enough to sit out on the terrace in a pair of shorts and write postcards. Hydra climbs up the hill from the harbour, much as Brenda Chamberlain described it in A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island. More houses now probably, and boutiques on the front selling jewellery and art – but maybe they had boutiques in the 1950s here too.

     

    Brenda Chamberlain arrived here in the early 1950’s fleeing an unhappy relationship and the failed fleeting promises of the art world. She was no stranger to islands having spent the previous seven years living on Ynys Enlli (Bardsey) at the end of the Llyn peninsular. She was an artist and a writer, her work had won awards and critical praise but she was still searching, perhaps looking for a place where she could settle for a few years, find a way through life.

     

    It is the words that she wrote on these island exiles which draw me here. I remember being entranced by the magic realism of her work in Tide-Race. And it is the colours of her work in paintings on Bardsey which stand out, deep bold reds and blues, the self-portrayal of her and her French artist lover on a fishing boat, physicality and perception. On Hydra it is as if the shear force of sun bleached the colours from her work. She turned to work in pencil, stark, vivid line drawings. She drew Venetian houses, dark priests on donkeys, a cat sprawled on a terrace, a wine jug on a balcony.

       

    And in the same time and space she kept a journal. The writing is spare, deliberately trying to capture the hard, sun shaped character of Hydra. She is trying to write herself into the island. She becomes involved with an islander who is charged with the murder of a tourist. She flees to the convent and the nuns offer her sanctuary. She writes as if it is an exile of years but she will only stay for a few days. The story is elliptical and never quite as true as it sounds.

              
    The rooftops are tiled and still. There was a cockerel crowing earlier and this morning the disconcerting braying of donkeys carrying overweight tourists around the streets. I buy a bottle of cheap wine in a plastic bottle from the supermarket – four euros for one and half litres. It helps writing the postcards.

     


    Lewis Davies is a writer, playwright and publisher. His most recent book is Love and Other Possibilities.

    Brenda Chamberlain’s work on Hydra A Rope of Vines Journal from a Greek Island is available as part of the Library of Wales series.

    A biography of Brenda Chamberlain: Artist and Writer by Jill Piercy will be published in 2012. Literature Wales will also be running a Literary Tour on Brenda in Autumn 2012.

  • Making Hay

     

    As everyone is looking forward to an exciting - if a little muddy - week at the Hay Festival this year, the Library of Wales series will be proudly represented there by Philip Pullman, Dai Smith and Jon Gower, who will be discussing the most recent addition to the Library of Wales series, Make Room for the Jester on Sunday (June 5th). 

     

    On this luxurious Sunday morning at 11.30am - which will give you enough chance to have a lie-in and stop for elevenses beforehand - Philip Pullman, Dai Smith, Jon Gower and Richard Davies will be picking over Make Room for the Jester; that haunting, overlooked classic of north Wales by Stead Jones. It is the latest volume to be published in the Library of Wales, and one which tells the story of a group of young men over a long, eventful and bewildering summer at the seaside town of Porthmawr.

     

     

    Philip Pullman opens his foreword to the volume by saying,

     

    Stead Jones and Make Room for the Jester: well, I’d never heard of it. But there are books that are unjustly forgotten, and I think this is one of them. When I read it for the first time a few months ago I was enchanted with it, not only for the memories of place and atmosphere it evoked so skilfully, not only for the light touch and the sympathetic voice of the narrator, but mainly for the brilliantly drawn portrait of an extraordinary individual...

     

    And it is this individual, Gladstone Williams, which for Pullman provides the sheer ‘boundless inventiveness’ of the book. Lew, the narrator, seriously chases ambitions in education, where Gladstone is ‘a dropout’.

     

    The novel, which portrays their lives and their run-ins with infamous drunk Ashton Vaughan, was described as “the Welsh Catcher in the Rye” on its publication in 1964. And, like The Catcher in the Rye, Make Room for the Jester ought to be “one of those books” which everyone should read as part of their growing up.

     

    About the Author

     

    Stead Jones was born Thomas Evan Jones in 1922 and was brought up in Pwllheli, north Wales. He attended University College Bangor, where his studies were halted by World War Two and five years in the British Army. He in fact found himself in France on D-Day, and was later promoted from private to corporal and given a signal detachment in India and Burma. Make Room for the Jester is his first novel, and was published in 1964 in both the UK and the USA to much critical acclaim. It was followed in 1966 by The Ballad of Oliver Powell (published under the title The Man with the Talents in the USA), and in 1968 by his third and last novel, The Lost Boy. He published all his books under the pseudonym of Stead Jones.

     

    If you’re coming for the whole festival (an impressive commitment - but then again can anyone get tired of Hay’s second-hand bookshops?), or if you’re only coming for this week, or even just for the weekend, make sure you stop by and have a listen.

     

    Philip Pullman, Dai Smith, Jon Gower and Richard Davies - Sunday 5th of June, 11.30am, Elmley Foundation Theatre.

     

    For more info, have a peek at www.hayfestival.com

  • Philip Pullman Praises North Wales Classic

    Photograph: Philip Pullman Praises North Wales Classic

     

    Philip Pullman, much loved and acclaimed author of the His Dark Materials, the first book of which (Northern Lights) was made into a film The Golden Compass (2009), has chosen to write a foreword for one of his favourite writers, Stead Jones for the Library of Wales series.

     

    He writes, “When I read it… I was enchanted with it, not only for the memories of place and atmosphere it evoked so skillfully, not only for the light touch and the sympathetic voice of the narrator, but mainly for the brilliantly drawn portrait of an extraordinary individual.”

    As a child, Philip Pullman went to school in Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech. He still has strong roots in North Wales, receiving a Honorary Degree from Bangor University in 2007 and recently becoming a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. It is perhaps no wonder then that he feels a connection with Stead Jones’ novel Make Room for the Jester which takes place in the North Wales seaside town of Porthmawr.

    Make Room for the Jester will be available from the 3rd March to mark World Book Day this year. Make Room for the Jester is a remarkable and welcome rediscovery and a great addition to the Library of Wales series, which aims to republish classic Welsh texts in English.

    There’s fraud and farce, drunkenness and temperance in the wartime work. Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer. It will be a summer that changes their lives. When the charming, but drunk, Ashton Vaughan returns home he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, scandal and death which will change the town forever.

    If you are looking for something to read for World Book Day on the 3rd March, then you couldn’t go much better than Make Room for the Jester

     

    Written by: Eluned Gramich
    Monday, February 28, 2011

  • Philip Pullman Praises North Wales Classic

    Philip Pullman, much loved and acclaimed author of the His Dark Materials, the first book of which (Northern Lights) was made into a film The Golden Compass (2009), has chosen to write a foreword for one of his favourite writers, Stead Jones for the Library of Wales series.

    He writes,"When I read it… I was enchanted with it, not only for the memories of place and atmosphere it evoked so skillfully, not only for the light touch and the sympathetic voice of the narrator, but mainly for the brilliantly drawn portrait of an extraordinary individual.”

    As a child, Philip Pullman went to school in Ysgol Ardudwy, Harlech. He still has strong roots in North Wales, receiving a Honorary Degree from Bangor University in 2007 and recently becoming a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. It is perhaps no wonder then that he feels a connection with Stead Jones’ novel Make Room for the Jester which takes place in the North Wales seaside town of Porthmawr.

    Make Room for the Jester will be available from the 3rd March to mark World Book Day this year. Make Room for the Jester is a remarkable and welcome rediscovery and a great addition to the Library of Wales series, which aims to republish classic Welsh texts in English.

    There’s fraud and farce, drunkenness and temperance in the wartime work. Lew Morgan and Gladstone Williams are two friends trying to make sense of their lives over a long hot summer. It will be a summer that changes their lives. When the charming, but drunk, Ashton Vaughan returns home he triggers a chain reaction of ruin, scandal and death which will change the town forever.

    If you are looking for something to read for World Book Day on the 3rd March, then you couldn’t go much better than Make Room for the Jester

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