We are delighted to announce that three of Parthian's recently published authors - Tyler Keevil, Jemma L. King and Meic Stephens - have been nominated for the prestigious Wales Books of the Year award, and will be hoping to follow in the footsteps of previous Parthian winners John Harrison (in 2013 and 2011) and Deborah Kay Davies (in 2009).
Jemma and Tyler will be attending and reading at the Parthian Rarebit event at Hay Festival on Monday 26 May 2014, 8.30pm as part of Parthian's 21st birthday bash. Be sure to purchase tickets here so that you can come down and congratulate them in person!
Nominee #1: Tyler Keevil (for The Drive [Myriad Editions, 2013]; in the Fiction catagory)
Story: 'Mangleface' (Taken from Burrard Inlet, 2014)
Tyler was raised in Vancouver, Canada. He first came to the UK in 1999 to study English at Lancaster University. He returned home to finish his degree, and after graduating undertook a variety of bizarre jobs, working as a treeplanter, a landscape gardener, a deckhand on a fishing barge, a ‘greenhorn’ in the shipyards, a restaurant busser and a kayak shop assistant. After paying back his student loan, and saving up some money, he moved to Prague to try his hand at being a starving writer – the only problem being that he didn’t know how to write yet. The money ran out before he learned, and after a brief stint living in Birmingham, he moved to Wales in 2003.
While working part-time cleaning toilets at a petrol station, Tyler committed to learning the craft and he began selling his stories to magazines. He is interested both in literary and slipstream fiction, and has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Transmission, Dream Catcher, Black Static, and On Spec, among others. A translation of his story, ‘Masque of the Red Clown’ has also recently been commissioned by the French-Canadian magazine, Solaris. Tyler has also written for the screen; a short film he wrote recently aired on ITV Wales, whilst another picked up the Welsh Dragon Award at the Newport International Film Festival. Welsh editors have always been supportive of his writing, from Arthur Smith to Dafydd Prys to Francesca Rhydderch to Helle Michelson, and now more recently Lucy Llewellyn at Parthian.
Like most Canadians, Tyler enjoys his winter sports, including hockey and snowboarding, but since coming to Wales he has discovered the wonders of hiking and camping – particular along the Pembrokeshire coast. He currently works part-time in a factory near his hometown of Llanidloes, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.
Tyler’s mastery of the short form has seen him win a number of awards, most notably a Writer of the Year award from Writers Inc. of London. His debut novel Fireball (2010) was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year, shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize and received the Media Wales People’s Prize 2011. His second novel, The Drive, was published by Myriad Editions in August 2013, and his first collection of short stories, Burrard Inlet, was published by Parthian in May 2014.
You can download the story in PDF format here. (If download does not start, then right click the link and select 'Save link as'.)
Selected bibliography
Fireball (Parthian, 2010)
Burrard Inlet (Parthian, 2014)
Contributed to
Rarebit (anthology) (Parthian, 2014)
