Every day throughout May, you will be able to visit the Library of Wales website to download your free story, drawn from Story, vols I and II - a collection boasting the finest Welsh short fiction ever written and featuring some of the most talented literary names from both past and present, including the legendary Dylan Thomas and the award-winning Rachel Trezise, as well as read all about the chosen author.

Day 10: 'Bunting' by Jon Gower

(Taken from Too Cold for Snow, 2012)

Jon Gower was born in 1959 in Llanelli, and read English at Girton College, Cambridge University. He is a writer, performer and broadcaster, as well as a producer with Boomerang, one of Wales’ most dynamically creative TV and radio companies. As a former BBC Wales’ Arts and Media correspondent, Jon has been making documentary programmes for television and radio for some thirty years, the most recent covering subjects such as the secret life as a poet of Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum (based on the book Oh Dad! by Lloyd Robson) and the Summer of Love in San Francisco. He also presented First Hand, BBC Radio Wales’ arts programme, and worked, variously, as public affairs officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and as a current affairs journalist for HTV. Winner of the John Morgan travel writing prize, he has eleven books to his name, in both Welsh and English, about travel and local history. He has written books on non-fictional subjects as diverse as a disappearing island in Chesapeake Bay in An Island Called Smith (2001) and a West Wales tour in psycho-geography in Real Llanelli (2000), as well as the fiction of Dala’r Llanw (2009), Uncharted (2010), a novel described by Jan Morris as ‘unflagging and unfailingly inventive’, and Big Fish (2000). Too Cold For Snow, a collection of short stories, was released in 2012, and so the publication about the Welsh coastline, Wales at Water’s Edge – A Coastal Journey, where his text complements beautiful photography by Jeremy Moore. His latest book, The Story of Wales, will accompany a landmark BBC series. He has recently published a book about his home town and in 2011 was an English language judge for the Wales Book of the Year. In 2009 Jon was awarded a major Creative Wales award to explore the Welsh settlement in Patagonia, and in 2012 he won the Welsh Language Wales Book of the Year Prize for his novel Y Storïwr. Jon is currently Hay Festival International Fellow as well as Fellow of The Welsh Academy, and is working on a critical biography of the American actor Steve Buscemi. In what little spare time he has Jon develops and performs theatre pieces with actor Gerald Tyler and trumpeter Tomos Williams. Jon lives in Cardiff with his wife Sarah and two book-loving daughters, Elena and Onwy.

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

Too Cold for Snow (Parthian, 2012)

Contributed to

Story II (anthology) (Library of Wales, 2014)