Wales | Wales
Jan.15.2010
How can there be a favourite poem? Milton, Dickenson, Browning, cummings, Arnold, Shelley, Frost, Donne, Eliot, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Plath, Thomas, Pope, Whitman, Blake, Ginsberg, Chaucer, Hopkins, Neruda, Williams, Spenser, Angelou, Byron, Pound, Coleridge, Roetke, Hildegard of Bingen...
There...
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Dec.27.2009
Welsh Icons ("an Encyclopedia and Gazetteer of Wales and all Things Welsh - A Cymrupedia if you like."...uh, "Cymru" being the Welsh word for Wales.) lists me among the "iconic" writers on its site. That puts me in the company of thriller king Ken Follett, sinister...
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Sep.10.2009
Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
I keep finding new reasons why I write my novels about the Palestinians. Usually these reasons have nothing to do with the Palestinians.
Here’s the one that may be the deepest, the one I’ve known about for a while, but...
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Aug.10.2009
The Guardian Obituary for Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis has now appeared, and you can read it here.
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Aug.07.2009
In his terrific “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” Stephen King notes that the best way to start a novel is with a compelling “what if.” Try this one: “Vacation Killer” sends out a chain email declaring that he’s kidnapped a woman and that if you don’t forward the email to 10 friends he’ll “slit...
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Aug.04.2009
Issue 6 of the Romanian journal, 'Contemporan Orizont Literar' (and in English, 'C&LH', editor-in-chief, Daniel Dragomirescu) is now available. It features my interview with Swansea poet, Peter Thabit Jones, A Poet is born, not made, on p.3-8. It also features fellow Red Room writer, Peggy...
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Aug.03.2009
I’m delighted to present a guest blogger today whose terrific new novel STOP ME is out tomorrow. Richard Jay Parker was born in the same South Wales town as me, just around the corner from where my parents now live. In our different ways, clearly, the mean streets of Newport shaped a real pair of...
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Jul.29.2009
I have just heard the sad news of the death of Dylan's daughter, Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis. She was an inspiring poet and tutor in her own right, and a marvellous advocate for her father's work. I was privileged to attend one of Aeronwy's poetry workshops in Laugharne a year ago: it is a memory that...
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Jul.16.2009
The new blog I've started with fellow crime writers Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill and Barbara Nadel has a new post from me today. It's about why I came to write so-called genre fiction. It starts like this:
Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I...
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Jun.23.2009
Workshop with Peter Thabit Jones, Kristine Doll and August Bover
I went to an excellent workshop at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea last Saturday. It was chaired by Swansea poet, Peter Thabit Jones, editor of The Seventh Quarry. Kristine Doll from the USA, and August Bover from Catalonia...
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