Literary Event - THREE WELSH POETS

TONY CURTIS, Wales’ first professor of Poetry, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He was born in Carmarthen in 1946 and has published over thirty books, including eight collections of poetry and has won the Western Mail’s Dylan Thomas Prize and the Dylan Thomas Award for Spoken Poetry, judged by Dannie Abse and Dylan’s daughter Aeronwy.

He is touring with the My Life with Dylan Thomas Talk 2014 Centenary Tour and at the Hay Festival appeared with Grahame Davies with a combined collection of bilingual poetry – The Alchemy of Water.

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GRAHAME DAVIES, is a Welsh poet, novelist, editor and literary critic, who has won numerous prizes, including the Wales Arts Council's Book of the Year Award (2002)

He is the author of 17 books in Welsh and English, including: The Chosen People, a study of the relationship of the Welsh and Jewish peoples; The Dragon and the Crescent, a study of Wales and Islam; a novel, Everything Must Change, about the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the popular work of psychogeography, Real Wrexham.

A native of Wrexham, now based in Cardiff and London, he has a degree in English from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a PhD from Cardiff University, where he was an honorary fellow in the department of religious studies.
He has been awarded an honorary D.Litt from Anglia Ruskin University, and is a Fellow and Governor of Goodenough College, London. He travels internationally as a reader and lecturer. His poetry has been translated into many languages.

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JONATHAN EDWARDS was born and brought up in Crosskeys, South Wales. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, has written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government and journalism for The Big Issue Cymru, and currently works as an English teacher.

He won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales new writer’s bursary in 2011, and in 2012 won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Poetry Review, The North, Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review.

My Family and Other Superheroes introduces a vibrant and unique new voice from Wales. The superheroes in question are a motley crew. Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo – all leap from these pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism. If the author’s subjects have something in common with RS Thomas, or even Terry Street-era Douglas Dunn, his technique and approach owe at least as much to contemporary American poets like James Tate and David Wojahn.

THREE WELSH POETS: TONY CURTIS+ GRAHAME DAVIES + JONATHAN EDWARDS