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It is also the story of three ladies who formed a musical partnership called The Dorian Trio in the early twentieth century. Generations of children who were brought up in Wales in the 1930s, 40s and 50s knew of the Trio who travelled around schools performing and educating. They worked at University College of North Wales for ten years and later at Aberystwyth, travelling around south Wales giving concerts. However, by World War II they had turned their attention to farming in Llanarth, Ceredigion where they kept Welsh indigenous breeds. Their main interest was Welsh cobs. The Llanarth stud became world famous; their knowledge of genetics added impetus to the quality and standard of their stock. They were winners at international events. The three ladies were single-minded achievers. In the 1980s, they bequeathed the enterprise to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth for safekeeping.
As Teleri Bevan notes, “But unfortunately, old age brought a tragic ending to the story, with the dismantling of the farm and stud by the university who had been gifted the estate and farming enterprise. Many will remember the acute anger and disappointment at the final sale, the dispersal of the Llanarth stud and the press headlines and television programmes. Pauline and Enid died of broken hearts.”
Teleri Bevan was raised on a farm in Ceredigion. She spent most of her working life at BBC Wales as a radio producer, becoming the first Editor of Radio Wales when it was launched in 1978. Subsequently, she became its Head of Programmes. Now retired, she enjoys writing and this is her fourth book.
The Ladies of Blaenwern is published by Y Lolfa, priced at £8.95 and will be launched at the International Pavilion at the Winter Fair in Builth Wells on Monday 29 November.
Stori drist fferm cobiau Blaenwern, Ceredigion
Mae’r llyfr The Ladies of Blaenwern yn adrodd yr hanes fel y bu i Goleg Prifysgol Cymru werthu fferm magu cobiau o enwogrwydd rhyngwladol a ewyllyswyd iddynt, nôl yn yr 1980au.
Yn ogystal, mae’n sôn am stori tair gwraig a luniodd bartneriaeth gerddorol The Dorian Trio yn negawdau cynnar yr ugeinfed ganrif. Teithiai’r Dorian Trio o gylch ysgolion Cymru benbaladr, yn diddanu ac addysgu plant. Bu’r Trio hefyd yn gweithio yn adrannau cerddoriaeth colegau y brifysgol ym Mangor ac Aberystwyth yn ddiweddarach, ac yn cynnal cyngherddau yng nghymoedd y de. Ond erbyn adeg yr Ail Ryfel Byd roedd y gwragedd wedi troi eu sylw at ffermio yn Llanarth, Ceredigion ac yno roeddynt yn cadw bridiau brodorol. Eu diddordeb pennaf oedd magu cobiau Cymreig.
Daeth y fferm yn fyd-enwog; roedd eu gwybodaeth am eneteg yn rhoi symbyliad uwch i ansawdd a safon eu stoc. Roeddynt yn enillwyr mewn cystadlaethau rhyngwladol. Roedd y tair yn gyflawnwyr unplyg. Yn y 1980au, ewyllyswyd y fferm i Goleg Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth er mwyn ei diogelu i’r dyfodol.
Fel y dywed yr awdur, “Yn anffodus, wrth i’r gwragedd heneiddio, daeth diwedd trychinebus i’r stori, gyda’r fferm magu cobiau yn cael ei gwahanu’n ddarnau a’i gwerthu. Bydd sawl un yn cofio’r dicter a’r siom yn ystod yr arwerthiant olaf, y penawdau papur newydd a’r rhaglenni teledu. Bu Pauline ac Enid farw o dorcalon.”
Cyhoeddir The Ladies of Blaenwern gan Y Lolfa. Pris £8.95. Bydd y llyfr yn cael ei lansio yn y Pafiliwn Rhyngwladol ar faes y sioe yn Llanelwedd, adeg y Ffair Aeaf, ar ddydd Llun 29 Tachwedd.
Life in the Coal House reminds us of those pleasant and not so pleasant experiences and contains the family’s personal photographs. The experience certainly changed the family’s way of thinking. Debra comments, “I look at things differently now… having lived in circumstances where I know that, if the fire went out, there would be no food for the family, well, that does change your outlook on all sorts of things. I really appreciate thinks now that I used to take for granted.”
Cerdin adds, “I’m extremely proud of the way that my family coped with their various experiences in the Coal House… the children went through massive changes, like speaking another language as well as adapting to a whole new way of living, and they did all this without complaining or protesting too much.”
Life in the Coal House may make interesting reading for the Snowdonia house incumbents. Life in the Coal House retails at £3.95 and is published by Y Lolfa in October 2010.
Bipolar Cardiff Author Launches Bangkok Novel To Celebrate World Mental Health Day
By Ceri Shaw, 2010-09-11
World Mental Health Day will be celebrated at the Wales Millennium Centre this year with the launch of a novel Bamboo Grove , set in Bangkok, with a bipolar teenager as its main character. Manic depressive author Romy Wood looks at the extremes of life in the Far East through the eyes of Jessica, a young woman who also has the disorder. Precarious at the best of times and vulnerable to exotic job offers, Jessica meets Moses, a pseudo-Buddhist monk and Pippa, a Romanian illegal immigrant, and is sent to Bangkok by a quixotic pair of young businessmen. All become intricately, messily bound by the unique and rather dubious organization that is Eastern Vision. The empire has one foot in the seedier realms of metaphysical Surrey and the other amongst the slums and skyscrapers of the City of Angels. From faux-Eastern objets to real estate, client-centred sperm-donation to gypsy magic, the tangled fortunes of Eastern Vision go from strength to strength and back again. Bamboo Grove is a very funny satire about sex, financial boom and bust, corruption, cultural collision, fertility, altruism and unethical tourism.
Romy Wood taught drama in comprehensive schools for ten years. She works as an associate Lecturer for the Open University. This novel is informed by her experiences of Romania and Thailand, where she has friends and family, as it is by Romys life as a woman with Bipolar Disorder. She lives with her husband and three children in Cardiff.
Prize- Winning “Geordie Exile in Wales” Publishes Novel Of Youth, Age and Obsession on Tyneside 'Bumping' by Tony Bianchi
By Ceri Shaw, 2010-04-21
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North Shields-born and bred Tony Bianchi is of Italian descent but learnt Welsh so well that he took the major Fiction prize in Welsh, the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize, in 2007, as well as being nominated twice over for the Welsh Book of the Year for his novels in the language. He also taught himself the strict poetic metres and was the 2007 judge for Welsh entries of the Ireland-based International Poetry Competition, File Filochta, which he himself won in 2004. The son of a policeman, he spent most of his career as Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales. Bumping , published in May 2010, is Bianchis first novel in English. The first two of Bianchis Welsh novels explore with great sensitivity the compromises and realignments experienced by old people needing care and their families. Inspired by his fathers memories of his Merchant Navy days in wartime America, Bumping also takes age as a major theme in his portrayal of narrator eighty-six year-old Tom, struggling to adapt to life in a care home and the way his memories and thought trails are about quarter of an hour out of synch with everybody elses (indeed, John Williams, author of Cardiff Dead and Malcolm X, praises Bumping for this quality of slippage, A wise and tender portrait of ordinary lives slipping slowly out of kilter with the brave new world around them.) Tom is only one of three main narrators, however, making this a novel with truly wide readership appeal across the generations, as well as one of distinctive contemporary colloquial Tyneside voices. Bumping interweaves three stories: each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The bumping of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one characters passion for recreational lock-picking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged way leave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry, and the heart-breakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. The themes include relationships with home and place, male preoccupation with mechanisms and systems, moral evasion, and the tyranny of random events. Bumping is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock picking and Californian ladybirds. The author explains the meaning of the title and the impact of Tyneside on his writing, People bump into each other as simple as that. The novel turns around a number of chance events. All of the characters believe that order, even contentment, are just an arm's-reach away. If only they can get over the next hurdle, explain themselves a little better, show that they are worthy of love then all will be well. But the pattern of their lives is much more random than they can ever allow. 'Bumping' also means 'lock-picking'. You need to read Barry's story to find out why this is significant. This is what he does, what he can do, it is his own, personal attempt at controlling a little bit of the world. Among the books that have influenced me is Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory. I'd love to do for Tyneside what Carson did for Belfast in that book, and perhaps I'll work up to it. It needs doing. But it needs to be elliptical, full of the unexpected, the awkward, the plainly barmy! Tony Bianchi is currently a freelance writer and translator, living in Cardiff. Look inside and order 'Bumping' HERE. ( Available May 6th ) |
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Pritchards Nose , the debut novel of Sam Adams, tells the tale of a man who lost his nose in strange circumstances. Intrigued by the mysterious legend of the man with a hole where his nose should be, Martin, a literary researcher, goes on the trail of a long-lost manuscript belonging to Thomas Prichard, the 19th century author of the tales of the Welsh highwayman, Twm Sion Cati . Woven into this literary detective story is the fictional autobiography of Prichard himself, following him from his childhood in rural Wales, along the drovers' road to London and a career on the stage. The novel ends with the puzzle of how Prichard ended his days down and out in Swansea and without his nose.
In this revealing story, Sam Adamss nose for the Welsh past is combined with his poets eye to bring the nineteenth century alive to all our senses. Sam Adams said, This is a book that had to be written in order to satisfy an obsession with Prichard that has extended over thirty years. What I knew of Prichard when I began looking into his life was that he had written a novel called Twm Shn Catti about a remarkable, eccentric character well remembered still, especially in Tregaron, his home patch, who in real life, as Thomas Jones Esq., 400 years ago, had been a poet, antiquary and genealogist, but in legend became famous as a merry rogue who, by disguise, mimicry, trickery and wit, and no little courage, overcame his enemies and won at last the hand of a grand lady. The little we know for certain of the history of Prichard himself is almost as strange and fascinating as that of Twm Shn Catti, and I have not been able to let go of it. Prichards Nose is an attempt to fill in all those gaps in his life that research could not bridge. Why was his childhood spent in a remote farm high on the mountain above Sennybridge? How did he find his way to London as a boy? Why did he hate the Reverend Benjamin Jones of Builth? Why did he choose Jeffery Llewelyn as a pen name? How did he become an actor? And how did he lose his nose? Sam Adams comes from Gilfach Goch, Glamorgan and is a former editor of Poetry Wales and a former chairman of the English-language section of Yr Academi Gymreig. He edited the Collected Poems and Collected Stories of Roland Mathias, is the author of three monographs in the Writers of Wales series and is a frequent contributor of poems, criticism and essays to a number of magazines. He published his third collection of poems, Missed Chances in 2007. Pritchards Nose (9.95) will be published by Y Lolfa on the 16 March 2010
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Thursday 26 November sees the Cardiff launch of Y Lolfa’s first book-DVD package, at Womanby Street’s bar, Y Fuwch Goch. Multi-prize-winning TV documentary film maker Colin Thomas’ awards include three from BAFTA Cymru, as well as the Prix Europa, the Gold Award at Houston International Film Festival, and the Jury Award at the Celtic Film and TV Festival. Now for the first time, his documentary Hughesovka and the New Russia , presented by Professor Gwyn Alf Williams, is available to keep. First transmitted in English to the UK network on BBC2 in 1991, the three-part series won BAFTA Cymru’s inaugural Best Documentary Award of that year. The DVD is published together with Colin Thomas’ first book, Dreaming a City: From Wales to Ukraine, which brings the story of Hughesovka, the town established by Welsh people in Ukraine, up to the present day.
Colin Thomas and Gwyn Alf Williams had a long and productive working relationship respectively as film producer and presenter, mainly on popular Welsh history programmes such as The Dragon has Two Tongues, made by the co-operative company Teliesyn. But they also formed a strong friendship, and this honest account of the bonds – and occasional blow-ups – of this creative relationship in television from 1981 to the Professor’s death in 1995, make Dreaming a City a fitting tribute to a fine historian and well-loved figure.
Author Colin Thomas said,
" I have always thought that what happened to the city founded by John Hughes and his Welsh workers told a much bigger story. But I have been surprised to discover, in writing a book about a place that has fascinated me for years, the degree of personal revelation involved. I have found myself exploring my own hopes for a better world. For many years I shared some of those dreams with the late great Prof Gwyn Williams and I''m delighted that this book/DVD package will form a tribute to Professor Williams, as well as bringing the Hughesovka story bang up to date ."
Both DVD and book tell the remarkable tale of a city created in the 1870s by Welsh capitalist John Hughes and his team of seventy Welsh miners and steelworkers. Its transition from Hughesovka in Russia, to Stalino in the Soviet Union, and then to Donetsk in the newly-independent Ukrainian nation, is a story of Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union in microcosm. Dreaming a City traces the town’s growth from patriarchal beginnings through the Russian revolutions, Bolshevism, Stalinism, Nazi occupation and the collapse of Communism, Nineties rising Ukraine nationalism, to Ukraine post-independence in the present market economy. Partly a revisiting of the making of the television series Hughesovka and the New Russia, this book is Russian and Welsh social and political history; travel journalism, and a tribute to Welsh historian Gwyn Alf Williams, as well as being a personal memoir of a life in TV and history. Above all, though, it explores the tensions between a belief in social change and the danger implicit in utopian visions.
Extracts from Hughesovka and the New Russia will be shown at the launch, which commences at 7.30pm at Y Fuwch Goch/The Red Cow, Womanby St, Cardiff. The book/DVD package is available at good bookshops and from amazon, gwales and www.ylolfa.com .
John Hughes on Wikipedia
John James Hughes (1814 – June 1889) was a Welsh engineer, businessman and founder of a city in Ukraine. The city was originally named Yuzovka or Hughesovka (Юзовка) after Hughes, ("Yuz" being a Russian or Ukrainian approximation of Hughes) but was renamed Stalino in 1924 (in 1961 the name was changed again, to Donetsk).... more here
Swansea Writer Launches Novel in a Railway Carriage, the Smallest Cinema in Wales
By Ceri Shaw, 2009-05-08
Alan Bilton is now an academic specialising in silent film, and has taught literature and film at the universities of Manchester, Liverpool Hope, and currently, Swansea. His official activities range from showing Chaplin movies to undergrads, to taking film clips to graduate classes in Spain and the US, and delivering conference papers on silent film and American Literature in Prague, Mississippi, Zaragoza, Rennes, Nicosia, Seattle and Oslo.
The novel features nightmarish train journeys: the anxiety of lateness; losing or merely lugging around luggage; the pressure of packed stations and waiting for loved ones; carriages which are chopped up and fed to a trains furnace while a bride and groom look on, en route to their honeymoon: all appear or recur in this fantastically surreal and stylish debut. Alan explains,
The idea of a rail journey as a metaphor for life has a long modernist pedigree from Freud, to Russian novels. The journeys in The Sleepwalkers Ball are influenced by war images, or one of my favourite films, Closely Observed Trains, which like my novel, is a slapstick comedy about death, and also juxtaposes the romantic with the sinister. Modelled on silent film, the author chose to cast silent film actress Clara Bow as his leading lady, creating an exaggerated emotional world of slapstick happening and reoccurence, into which the reader could project their longings, fears and fantasies. Set in a fictional (and strangely black and white) Scottish city dominated by a castle, it is based on Alan Biltons experiences as an undergraduate in Stirling, I was there in the Thatcher era: the town was run-down, depressed, violent at the edges... but I had discovered European films, modern art, books, and love too. Stirling was this amazing Kafka-esque Gothic place, all granite blocks, twisting cobblestones and the castle, and then you had the grim reality of most peoples working day. Im aiming for this tension in the novel, between work and play, dreaming and doing, my naive happiness then and the melancholy hopelessness all around. The Sleepwalkers Ball is united by a charismatic tour guide who takes the reader around the city, dipping in and out of the lives of Clara and her would-be suitor Hans Memling as they meet, miss, find and fail to hook up, though finally finding happiness.
Hoping to build on an increasing popular interest in silent comedy, Alan Bilton admits hed like his enthusiasm for this art form to spread beyond academia. Nevertheless, his credentials in the latter regard are impeccable, as he has written two nonfiction books, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (New York/Edinburgh, 2002), America in the 1920s (co-ed with Phil Melling, Helm, 2004), and is currently working on a third, Constantly Moving Happiness Machines: New Approaches to American Silent Film Comedy. His forthcoming book on silent film connects slapstick comedy to American culture in the Twenties, especially through themes of consumerism, mass consumption and the ideas of Hollywood as Americas dream factory, themes which also occur in The Sleepwalkers Ball.
As a kid, Alan says, I adored Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. But if Stan Laurel messed up or Charlie Chaplin was trapped, I got so worried. Slapstick comedy is about anxiety as well as wish-fulfilment: a game without consequences and a nightmare version of adult life. In my novel I have created cartoon-like and grotesque characters that we identify with emotionally but who are also apparitions shifting in time and space, in the way that silent film occupies a space between comedy and terror.
Born in York, living in Swansea and passionate about Scotland and early Twentieth-century America, Alan Bilton is one of the few writers who still describe themselves as British.
Aubrey Malone, a proud Irishman, sees many similarities between the Welsh and the Irish’s relationship with drink.
“I see a great affinity between Ireland and Wales in the sense of two small nations who were colonised by England and perhaps as a result of this developed a rebellious defiant streak, which led to colourful personalities who were sometimes unbalanced and sought either escapism through drink to make their poor circumstances bearable or dutch courage to try and do something about them. For every Dylan Thomas there''s a Brendan Behan, for every Richard Burton a Richard Harris and for every Anthony Hopkins a Peter O''Toole.”
Welsh Drinkers (£4.94 / $7.50 approx ) is published by Y Lolfa and is available on www.ylolfa.com and in Welsh bookshops.
Set in the early eighties, shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and now published in the wake of the Israeli massacre in Gaza, it likely to prove controversial as the author is a committed Zionist.
However Judith Maro, the author, who now lives in Mumbles, Swansea, insists she disagrees strongly with present Israeli policies, as do many other Jewish intellectuals.
Author Judith Maro said: “I do hope the novel will also stimulate discussion about some difficult political issues which are relevant to Israel, Lebanon and Gaza today.”
Judith was brought up in Jerusalem and after graduating at the university there, joined the Zionist paramilitary Haganah organization. She met her future husband, Welsh sculptor Jonah Jones, at a British Army education centre in Palestine. She has lived for long periods in North Wales and Cardiff before settling with her family in Swansea.
She has written four novels in both English and Welsh and various essays and reviews and a memoir. She is fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic.
Cafodd Judith Maro ei magi yn Jerusalem. Priododd y cerflunydd Jonah Jones, ac wedi byw mewn sawl ardal o Gymru, mae bellach wedi setlo yn y Mwmbwls ger Abertawe. Er ei bod yn Iddewes, mae hi fel nifer o feddylwyr Iddewig eraill, yn anghytuno a pholisïau presennol llywodraeth Israel. Mae’n gobeithio y bydd The Stoat yn annog trafodaeth am faterion gwleidyddol sy’n berthnasol i Israel, Libanus, Gaza a Chymru heddiw.
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A Welsh author living in America was overcome by emotion twenty five years since leaving his homeland and became ludicrously patriotic, so decided to write a novel glorifying Wales. Peter Griffiths is a Welsh-speaking author from Cynheidre near Llanelli, moved to Denver, Colorado in 1972, but in the last few years has gravitated back to Wales.
Peter Griffiths said: In 1990, while driving from Heathrow to Bala, climbing the Berwyn from Llangynog, I distinctly remember being moved by the grandeur, and feeling ludicrously patriotic. How could I not write a novel glorifying Wales, its people, and its language? It would be aimed mainly at my circle people in the States, who go weak at the knees over Scotland and Ireland, but rarely over Wales.
The novel is called, Tongue Tied, and is set in the Tryweryn valley and the Rhondda. The novel considers how language has had an unifying and some times divisive role over the centuries. The author said: One is Welsh if one feels Welsh. The novel recognises the tension that arises at times between the majority of Welsh people who cant speak Welsh and the minority who can; and the divisiveness of the language in these instances is compared, with sadness, to its crucial unifying role over the millennia.
Tongue Tied is published by Y Lolfa on St Davids Day. The author now shares his time between Swansea and Denver. This is his first novel.
