Wales Comes to Soho

A Literary Walk and Readings at The Wheatsheaf, Soho on 25th May.

I will be there!

Literary Tourism 2013: Soho Welsh, Riotous Rhondda, Literary Ogmore and R S Thomas's Eglwysfach

After sold out literary tours to Machen country and Brenda Chamberlain's Bangor last year we have some more exciting new literary events arranged for you this year in partnership with Literature Wales' brilliant literary tourism programme. Join us on a sojourn to London for Soho Welsh, a trip down memory lane with Rachel Trezise and Boyd Clack in Riotous Rhondda and explore the Merthyr Mawr sand dunes on horseback to find out more about Dr Dannie Abse’s time in Ogmore. So much fun to be had! Book early to avoid disappointment.

 

 

1. Soho Welsh: The Wheatsheaf Readings with Tomos Owen, Nicholas Murray and Lewis Davies

 

Saturday 25 May, 2013

 

Join Cardiff University lecturer Dr Tomos Owen, author of Real Bloomsbury NicholasMurray, and writer Lewis Davies in exploring Welsh writers and their London lives. We will walk in the footsteps of cult gothic horror writer Arthur Machen, revered short story writer Rhys Davies, founding editor of the Everyman’s Library series Ernest Rhys and novelist Dorothy Edwards The tour includes readings and short talks in the streets and pubs of Soho and Fitzrovia, and finishes at The Wheatsheaf – a former haunt of Dylan Thomas, Augustus John and George Orwell.

The readings at the Wheatsheaf will include poets Susan Grindley and Ian Parks so be there!

The Horror! The Horror!

I have just put down Jeanette Winterson's latest novel in paperback, The Daylight Gate (Hammer) and putting it down proved very difficult during the reading of it as this always compulsive and lively writer has now taken possession of the horror genre by telling the story of the Pendle witch trials of 1612.

Winterson (like me) is a Lancastrian who believes that: "The north of England is untamed.  It can be subdued but it cannot be tamed. Lancashire is the wild part of the untamed." So where better to set a gripping story of wild goings on, of witchcraft, magic, the old religion, sex and violence.  From the opening sentence the story races away and draws on fantasy horror elements as well as real people and events such as the magician John Dee, Shakespeare, Alice Nutter and the witchfinder, Thomas Potts.  Winterson describes dungeons and witches with vivid relish but somehow avoids the pitfall of horror writing: extreme silliness.  This is largely because of the zest and vigour of the writing and hats off to Hammer for making the transition from old-fashioned British horror films to joining forces with Arrow Books (Random House) to produce what looks like being a series of horror-novellas by well-known writers.

I would not normally venture into this genre but I will follow Winterson anywhere and the journey was worth it.

Poetry Reading in Brighton

I am pleased to be reading under the Melos Press banner in Brighton this Thursday from my Acapulco: New and Selected Poems as part of the Pighog Plus! series of readings at the launch of Judith Cair's new book from Pighog.

Be there if you can!

The Great War Approaches: Echenoz and 14

Less than a year to go and already one can hear the distant crackle of machine-gun fire: 2014 is coming and, I think we can predict with reasonable certainty, The War will be mentioned obsessively and will dominate the media all year long.  Having written a book myself on the poets of the First World War I am hardly in a position to demur but I must confess to a certain dread of the first onslaught.

In France, one of my favourite contemporary novelists, Jean Echenoz, has jumped the gun and produced a characteristically spare, beautifully written and economical novel called simply, 14, which begins from the gloriously minimalist blurb: "Cinq hommes sont partis à la guerre, une femme attend le retour de deux d'entre eux. Reste à savoir s'ils vont revenir. Quand. Et dans quel état."

The dry, cool observation of Echenoz takes these five copains from their village in the Vendée on the Atlantic coast to the Ardennes.  They are ordinary young men, working at ordinary trades and the novel – not in any crudely buttonholing sense 'anti-war' –  shows exactly what 'état' they return in.  Echenoz, unlike his fellow-countryman Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose rage against the War in Journey to the end of the night makes all our English war poets look rather tame, lets us feel what its human impact is in a more unemotional way yet with an astonishing clarity.  His description of the shooting down of one of the young men by a German fighter plane is a little masterpiece of close observation that makes you feel you are there yet so few words are expended on the task.

I hope that when the great tsunami of 2014 washes over us there will be at least one or two contributions here that match this precision and restraint but I am not holding my breath.

Listen to This!

I am very pleased to say that Spoken Ink have now made available of a recording of me reading from my poetry collection Acapulco: New and Selected Poems published this year.  You can hear a sample on the Spoken Ink website.

Dante: The Latest Instalment

A new translation of Dante's Divine Comedy is launched this evening at the Italian Cultural Institute in London.  It is by J.G. Nicholls and having read his version of the Inferno when it was first published by the ever-reliable and enterprising Hesperus press I have no doubt that the new hardback compilation of his translations of the whole of Dante's epic will be an excellent one.

The book is published at £25 by Alma Classics with illustrations by Gustave Doré and is very attractive to handle but of course what matters is the translation and here Nicholls hasn't ducked the challenge of using verse to render Dante's famous line.  It works, in my view, because the verse flows naturally, doesn't try too hard to draw attention to itself and avoids the archaic and the 'poetic' to produce a highly readable and fluid read yet retaining the dignity of tone of the original:

Where, on a sudden, there before my eyes
            Stood three infernal Furies stained with blood.
            They looked like women and had women's ways,
 With bright green hydras twisted round the waist,
             With thin serpents and two-horned snakes for hair,
              Bound round their savage heads and interlaced.


Matthew Arnold, in his famous lectures on translating Homer, berated some of his contemporaries for their over-ingenious attempts to render Homer as an Anglo-Saxon or whatever.  The key thing, he said, was to 'reproduce the effect' of the original.  I feel that this translation succeeds in that vital aim.

Small Presses Rule OK?

Making Books for Love and Money: On the Value of Small Presses

Thursday 15 November at 7.00 p.m. 

London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, London WC1

with Charles Boyle, David Lea, Nicholas Lezard, Patrick McGuiness and Nicholas Murray

As the book world undergoes some of the biggest changes in its history, we ask what the value will be of small presses in the new literary landscape – and what those values are that they hold that make them so important for the future of the book. Discussing the question will be a panel made up of publisher, author, critic and bookseller, with Nicholas Murray, biographer and publisher of Rack Press, Charles Boyle of CB Editions, critic Nicholas Lezard, whose column in the Saturday Guardian has championed countless gems from small presses, Patrick McGuinness, poet and author of The Last Hundred Days (Seren), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and our own David Lea, bookseller at the London Review Bookshop.