Category: Wales

Welsh Ladies

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I felt very lucky to recently have an opportunity to be interviewed for a program on BBC Radio 4. It was a program created by writer Mab Jones, who had an idea inspired by a series of postcards she collected featuring women in traditional Welsh dress. She started to wonder about what the women would [...]

On Branwen’s Horses

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I have been thinking and writing about the Welsh legend of Branwen recently, in this micro-chapbook out with the Poetry Annals, Blind Horse Elegy (cover image by Victoria Brookland), and in the title poem itself which was a runner up in the Hopper Poetry Prize. When I think of the story of Branwen, I think of [...]

Wales and a Colonial Past

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Just recently, I wrote up an article about a TV historian's comments on Wales, and I mapped out how those comments were so very reminiscent of English colonialism in Wales. You can find it here on Wales Online. In the late nineties when I started university, there were such changes in Wales regarding devolution and [...]

Interview for Devolved Voices

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I recently did an interview for the Devolved Voices project at University of Aberystwyth. The idea of the project is to investigate the state of Welsh poetry in English since Wales’s devolution ‘yes’ vote of 1997. There is a particular focus on those poets who have emerged since 1997 and a consideration of the rise in poetry from women.

“Exiles always travel light”

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Having just spent a few months in Britain, I was really moved to read an article about exile by Costica Bradatan in the New York Times:

"Uprooting is a devastating blow because you have to separate yourself overnight from something that, for as long as you can remember, has been an important part of your identity. In a sense, you are your culture, customs, language, country, your family, your lovers"