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Wales Book of the Year Shortlist 2025: Little Universe

We're absolutely delighted for Natalie Ann Holborow , today shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2025 for her third poetry collection, the stellar Little Universe . Thanks to all the judges and huge congratulations to all the other wonderful writers on the shortlist! If you'd like to get involved, you can vote for your favourite book on the shortlist. ‘Poems of true wonder, mystery composed with precision. Natalie Ann Holborow is a custodian of beauty in the ordinary and the fragility of experience. The lyric moments of her Little Universe made me lift my eyes from the page and consult the stars.’ – Oliver James Lomax ' Little Universe presents an intense voyage through a recognisable Welsh landscape of family, hospital wards, homes, beaches, love, and new life. The poems encompass mythology, the joys of the everyday and the personal inevitability of illness and grief. This is a poetry acutely aware of the specificity of vocabulary and of the unconstrained p...

high-piled books... The Work & Stuff update

Hello long-neglected blog. So, I've made it to the other side of teaching my first semester on the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Gloucs (and some undergrad bits and pieces there and at Cardiff MET)... and also to the other side of organising Griff Rhys Jones' Cardiff Cameo Club Book Launch, The Welsh Cultural Embassy at The Wheatsheaf, and trips to both Laugharne (Take 1) and London Book Fair almost intact, bar a sprained ankle - damn you rainy road potholes. Time for some R&R and a bit of a Spring shake up in between seeing friends and family. BUT first for two updates... ONE: THE WORK & STUFF UPDATE Lots of the books I - and my brilliant authors - have been working on over my last year at the editorial helm of Parthian have recently been, or will soon be, launched into the world and I've been meeting with my 2015 authors too. Congratulations to Craig Hawes who has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for his d...

gwales.com Review of Windfalls: 'substantial, touching, entertaining and very fresh'

This latest collection by Susie Wild is substantial, touching, entertaining and very fresh; it is also a handsome production. Susie Wild is known for her live readings and the poems have an immediacy and accessibility which suggest this. The collection is in two parts: ‘The Carnivore Boyfriends’ and ‘Windfalls’. While the title poem of the first section is generally humorous, the last line suggests a history of bad experiences which is certainly born out in some of the later poems. Some are tender remembrances of early days, like ‘Brockley Cross’ or Wild’s hymn to her childhood bicycles, but ‘This Is Why We Can’t’ and ‘Traumatic Language’ evoke a seriously over-controlling partner, and ‘Newly Single’ the threat of rape or worse. The indirect language of this poem captures the small steps, doubts and excuses which end with ‘[p]erhaps you should / have pressed charges. Spoken to someone. / But you didn’t.’ There are some brilliant portraits here of men, like ‘Burton’s Boy’...

Wildlife

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