Remains of a Future City

Zoë Skoulding

These vibrant, multi-layered poems create a textual city of monuments, castles, bridges and labyrinths through which the reader is invited to wander. Such visions carry within them both hints of utopia and the seeds of disaster, as the future city is haunted by its ruins …

Batu-Angas, Envisioning Nature with Alfred Russel Wallace

Anne Cluysenaar

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), one of the most famous scientists of the 19th century and best known today as the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution, is the inspiration for this beautiful sequence of poems by Anne Cluysenaar …

Blind Spots

Carol Rumens

Certain to be one of the most read and talked-about poetry collections of the year, Blind Spots is a masterclass of inventive, intelligent, original, and relevant modern poetry.
A major voice in contemporary verse, Carol Rumens is admired as much for her technical brilliance as for the range, breadth and subtlety of her subject matter …

Qwerty

Paul Groves


This fresh collection contains not only the type of ironic, sly, and coolly witty poems we have come to expect from this writer but also material with quirky turns, melancholic hints, and playful flourishes. This book will delight existing fans and recruit many new ones …

Kyffin: A Figure in the Welsh Landsacpe

Ian Skidmore

Kyffin Williams (1918-2006) can fairly be claimed to be the most famous, and perhaps best-loved, artist from Wales in the post-war period. His distinctive paintings were eagerly sought after by collectors, and for many assumed an almost iconic status as expressions of the Welsh landscape and of ‘Welshness’.

Fighting Pretty

Louise Walsh

Women's boxing may not yet be an Olympic sport, after plans to preview it in Beijing were dropped. But there's plenty of fight left  in the sport yet, not least in the Welsh valleys. In an unsubtle hint to London 2012, Seren has published the fictitious tale of Welsh Women's boxer Lizzie Collins …

Ernest Zobole: A Life in Art

Sunday at the Skin Launderette

Kathryn Simmonds

Shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize for Best First Collection, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in Kathryn Simmonds´ first collection engage with both the quotidian and the transcendental…

Last Bird Singing

Allan Bush

“Walking Clifton Street, in any direction, is like going to your own funeral.”

A blacker than black Cardiff novel by first time novelist Allan Bush. Last Bird Singing  is an extraordinary and stunning evocation of one man’s inner life, dark, haunting and bitterly true. The walls, pubs and streets of Wales’ capital city loom through the blackness of an intense,  brilliantly realised story of loneliness and loss …

“A beautifully bleak ode to Cardiff…poetic, visceral, dark and rain-soaked. I’ve found a new hero in 70-year old Roath resident Allan Bush”. Buzz Magazine, April 2008

“This is a sharp, exciting contemporary novel which provides a poignant reality check on the glossy new brochures of modern life in this particular Celtic tiger economy. Fiction, for sure. But with the ring of authenticity.” Tony Heath, The Tribune, May 08

If You Fall I Will Catch You

Eifion Jenkins

If You Fall I Will Catch You is a futuristic fantasy by debut novelist, Eifion Jenkins. Thinking the unthinkable – knowing the unknowable. Gwidion is a boy on the verge of manhood to whom 9/11 means nothing. But the psychic shock waves of an event that once shook the world are still felt in his village, all that is left of what was once Wales …

"In scope and imagination, If You Fall is a breathtaking fiction traversing worlds - geographical, political and interstellar - with an ease that belies its first novel status … If You Fall is a novel destined for a stunning future and one assured of a deserved place on the bookshelf of great contemporary Welsh literature"
Steve Adams, South Wales Guardian, 7th May 2008

Click HERE for full review.