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The Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod will this year be taking centre stage in Washington D.C as one of the 160 organizations, musicians, poets, scholars, artists and craftsmen representing Wales as the Guest Nation at the two week long Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Washington D.C. 24 June 5 July.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival , which takes place every year and attracts over one million visitors from the USA and overseas, will welcome Wales as the featured Nation providing visitors with a unique opportunity to learn about Welsh culture. As representatives of Wales festivals, Llangollen will be an integral part of the Wales and the World Pavilion where they will be telling the unique story of Llangollen and the Welsh Eisteddfodic tradition on which it is based./p>
The International Eisteddfods presence in Washington will highlight the parallels between both events as the International Eisteddfods Executive Director, Mervyn Cousins explains, It is a great privilege to be part of such a major world festival with similar aims as ours. In the same way as the Llangollen Eisteddfod aims to promote world peace through music and dance, the Smithsonian Festival aims to do this by showcasing the best the Guest Nation has to offer to the rest of the world and we are very proud to be here representing Wales festivals. Llangollen is where Wales and the World meet and therefore this is an ideal opportunity for us to take Llangollen to the world!
During the two-week festival, that takes place between 24 28 June and 1 5 July senior Llangollen personnel will lead various presentations. The talks will range in their themes from how the Eisteddfod came into existence 63 years ago, through to the Festivals commitment to sustainable development and the environment, to how a small town in North Wales was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize!
Betty Belanus, Curator of the Wales Smithsonian Cymru program expressed her enthusiasm for the collaboration: "Having visited the Llangollen area during my extended research stay in Wales in 2007, I was very impressed with the beauty of the area as well as the obvious positive impact the International Eisteddfod has had on the town and environs. The idea of an International Eisteddfod illustrates the warm welcome that I have always felt in Wales. Although I have never had the pleasure of attending the event, its vision of promoting peace through mutual cooperation is much like that of our own Smithsonian Folklife Festival. We look forward to hosting the representatives of the International Eisteddfod who will be participating in the Festival, and we hope that visitors will be inspired by the global reach of Wales through finding out about events such as the International Eisteddfod. I believe that the depth of pride and determination of the Welsh people will shine in our event, through one on one interaction with the participants from all around Wales, including Llangollen.
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has collaborated with the Welsh Assembly Government to select the best that Wales has to offer. First Minister, Rhodri Morgan said: "No longer will Wales be Europes best kept secret. The Smithsonian is one of the worlds biggest cultural festival events and we have a unique opportunity to raise our profile in Washington and right across North America. Visitors to the festival will be able to learn more about our traditional and contemporary cultures and we hope that inspires them to visit, study or invest here."
Singer-songwriter Fflur Dafydd is the first Oxfam Emerging Writer of the Year. The first award of its kind to be offered at the Guardian Hay Festival, the prize was announced on Saturday 23 May at the festivals Sky Arts awards dinner. Only just turned thirty last August and about to be married this August, Fflurs first novel in English, Twenty Thousand Saints has received fantastic and wide-ranging reviews including in The Guardian, Diva magazine, Western Mail and Prospect magazine, where it was 2009s pick of the year. Hay Festival director Peter Florence has been a consistent and vocal advocate of the novel, describing it as, The most compelling novel Ive read in years; a love story, a thriller, and a profound meditation on language and identity... [Fflur Dafydd ranks alongside] Sarah Waters, Kate Atkinson and Zoe Heller [in representing] the blossoming and triumphs of a whole new generation of young women writers.
Presenting the award, together with a very rare first edition hardback copy of Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, David McCullough, Director of Oxfam said, We are very happy to work in partnership with the Hay Festival this year and congratulate Fflur Dafydd on being the first winner of our Emerging Writer of the Year Award.
Author Fflur Dafydd said, Its quite special for others to recognise in a thriller set on Bardsey island the deeper comments I wanted to make about privacy, loss, disillusion, language and identity. The Hay festival has been incredibly supportive of my writing, and warm thanks to Oxfam too!
Fflur has been publishing since she was twenty, and is a veteran of the international music and literary festival circuit. Under her belt are residencies in Helsinki, as well as performances in Croatia; Mantova, Italy; Chicago; Ireland, and the Netherlands. Fflur also took part in two sell-out events at the Hay Festival, reading with Dylan Thomas Prize Winner Nam Le, and the writer and broadcaster Jon Gower. She will now embark on a reading tour to promote Twenty Thousand Saints , appearing at the Latitude Festival, Suffolk and the Writers Reunion in Finland.
Set on Bardsey Island, the novel looks at how young women, starved of men as the boats stop bringing them, start to turn to each other for solace. It is Fflurs second novel to be set on Bardsey as the fruit of a six-week stint as writer-in-residence on the island in 2002. The first was the Welsh-language Atyniad, which was awarded the prestigious prose medal at the National Eisteddfod in 2006.
Twenty Thousand Saints is as much a lyrical romance as it is a literary novel with important things to say about the media, privacy and intrusion, the environment, discovery and national identity. Playing with cultural myths of islands, from The Lord of the Flies to Im a Celebrity Get me Out of Here, Dafydd sets up the cameras eye as witness and catalyst to how the islands female visitors degenerate one summer from delighted faux-primitivism (compost toilets!) to jungle-fever.
An unusual combination of straight and gay romance, mystery, rebellious nuns and politics (with a dry humour akin to Bernice Rubens), Twenty Thousand Saints is beautifully written with serious purpose. It is also a political book about post-devolution Wales, though that is one message that never submerges the novels lyricism or integrity of character.
Fflur Dafydd lectures in Creative Writing at Swansea University and lives in Carmarthen.
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As some of you will know, AmeriCymru is holding a major event in Portland, Oregon this year. The Left Coast Eisteddfod on August 21st and August 22nd, 2009 will be a major celebration of all things Welsh and the rich American-Welsh heritage. There will be performances by BBC Radio Wales Chris Needs, tenor Bruce Anderson, Here Be Dragons from Cardiff and Oceans Apart. Also appearing will be authors Niall Griffiths and Chris Keil, lovespoon carver extraordinaire David Western and many more. This is an ambitious project and it is intended to be the first of many such events but, of course, ambition has a price. In this particular case, we set out to raise $20,000.00 in order to stage this event. We are very pleased and proud to announce that we have raised $15,000.00 of that total. This is a remarkable achievement and we owe it all to you, our members and readers. We do not have large, corporate backers and, until recently, were ineligible for funding by the various grant bodies in the United States. The good news is: that we are now a 501(c)(3) charitable public organization recognized by the IRS, with full tax-exempt status. Further good news is that we are still able to accept sponsors for this event. If you wish to support the Left Coast Eisteddfod, please consider one of the two following options. We need to raise those final, few dollars to complete our preparations. Uncle Dai needs you. 1) Sponsorship: do you have a business based in Wales or a Welsh or Celtic-related business here in the US? If so, please consider advertising with AmeriCymru. We can offer generous sponsorship packages from as little as $200.00, which will associate your name both with the Eisteddfod and with AmeriCymru (the largest and fastest growing Welsh social network in the US). We are particularly concerned to work with accomodation providers, tour companies, cultural, artistic and technologies ventures. Contact Ceri Shaw or Gaabriel Becket at americymru@gmail.com . Act now to ensure maximum exposure, there are only two months to go before the Eisteddfod. 2) Donations: Anything you donate to our non-profit corporation, the Meriwether Lewis Memorial Eisteddfod Foundation, can be claimed as a tax-exempt donation on your 2009 taxes. Every cent you donate will be used to make the Eisteddfod a bigger and better occasion and to prepare similar future events. There is a donate button which pays directly into the Foundation bank account at the top of the left hand column on every page of the site. Any amount, great or small, is appreciated. If you do not feel comfortable using the PayPal donate button, please do not hesitate to contact us at americymru@gmail.com to make alternative arrangments. WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU AND SEEING YOU ALL AT THE LEFT COAST EISTEDDFOD IN PORTLAND ON AUGUST THE 21ST AND 22ND, 2009. DIOLCH YN FAWR, AMERICYMRU!
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A new profile question has been added to Americymru. It asks you to categorise your profile and presents you with a list of options to choose from. The idea is to make it easier to find certain kinds of profile on the site ( musicians, bands, accommodation providers, photographers etc. )
If you want to categorise your profile click on "Settings" in the top right hand corner of the home page. You will be taken to your "Profile" page. Scroll down until you find the new question and make your selection from the available options. You will then appear in the list in the relevant section in the dropdown menus under the "Members" tab on the main navbar. You can select more than one category if you wish but please ensure that all options selected are relevant to your profile.If your profile is a standard personal profile, simply check "Personal".
1. Click on "Settings"
2. Check the relevant option/options
3. Check your new listing in the dropdown menu.
