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.

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.
 

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