New Welsh Reader 132 (New Welsh Review, Summer 2023)

NONFICTION

'All the World in a Welsh Hayloft: When MR Thomas Met Jan Morris', photographs © MR Thomas

'Dawn Chorus, Vesper Flights: Yvonne Reddick on three broad-ranging nature essay collections by women which explore anthropomorphism, grief, ‘mansplaining’ and the necessary limits set by Nemesis'

FICTION

'Ice' Story by Jem Poster, photographs by Vanessa Winship

'An Eden' Story by Simon Howells

POETRY

'The Summer of Nadia Comăneci' Carrie Etter

'Outward Bound' Jonathan Edwards

'Arrows' Jonathan Edwards

'Days of 1998' Jonathan Edwards

'I Am Unlearning' Julia Forster

'Let's Pretend' Julia Forster

'Boulevard Saint-Laurent' Ceri Morgan

'Word Wound' Ceri Morgan

'Very Clear and Detailed in the Odd Brilliant Light' Elizabeth Chadwick-Pywell



Gwen Davies is a literary translator and has edited New Welsh Review since early 2011.



Vanessa Winship is an award-winning photographer (two World Press Photo

prizes, 1998 and 2008; Sony World Photographer of the Year, 2008; and the Henri Cartier Bresson Award, 2011). Her work is held in many collections, including the

National Portrait Gallery, the Sir Elton John collection, the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation and Tate Britain. Her photographic monographs include Schwarzes

Meer (2007), Sweet Nothings (2008), she dances on Jackson (2013), And Time

Folds (2018), Sète#19 (2019) and Seeing the Light of Day (2020). The photographs published in New Welsh Reader 132, summer 2023, are a selection from her most recent monograph, Snow (published by Deadbeat Club, 2022), a collaboration with Jem Poster that interleaves images of rural Ohio and the Amish community with the answering short story, ‘Ice’. vanessawinship.com



Jem Poster is the author of two novels, Courting Shadows (Sceptre, 2002)

and Rifling Paradise (Sceptre, 2006), as well as a collection of poetry, Brought to

Light (Bloodaxe, 2001). He is editor of Volume III in the six-volume Edward Thomas: Prose Writings (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-author, with Sarah Burton, of a handbook for fiction writers, The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The online courses he runs with Sarah Burton for writers of all levels can be found at https://between-the-lines-9bdd51.web ow.io



MR Thomas is an award-winning documentary lmmaker, formerly for BBC Arts and now freelance. For the past thirty years, he has been interviewing and photographing the writers and artists of Wales. A correspondence with Jan Morris over several years led to the visit in late July 2007 which is recorded as a feature-length profile, with photographs by MR Thomas, published in New Welsh Reader 132, summer 2023.



Yvonne Reddick’s books include Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Palgrave, 2017) and Burning Season (Bloodaxe, May 2023). Her work appears in The Guardian (Review) and the New Statesman, as well as New Welsh Reader/Review.



The fiction writer Simon Howells was born in south Wales in 1971.



Carrie Etter’s fourth and current poety collection is The Weather in Normal (Seren, 2018), while her fifth collection, Grief’s Alphabet, will be published by Seren in 2024. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.



Jonathan Edwards’ prize-winning poetry collections are My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014) and Gen (Seren, 2018). He received the Troubadour Poetry Prize in 2022, and lives in Crosskeys, Gwent.



Julia Forster received a Society of Authors grant in 2022 for her first poetry collection, currently in development. As an undergraduate at Warwick, she was awarded the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry and went on to study for an MLitt in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Her nonfiction book, Muses: Revealing the Nature of Inspiration, was published by Oldcastle Books in 2007, while her debut novel, What a Way to Go was published in 2016 by Atlantic. Her poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, including As Above So Below (ed Bethany Rivers), Poetry Wales, Hiraeth / Erzolirzoli (ed Eric Ngalle Charles), Poems from Snowdonia (ed Amy Wack) and The Result is What you See Today (eds Kim Moore, Paul Deaton & Ben Wilkinson). In 2020, she won the Lockdown Poetry Prize in The Telegraph, and last year her poem, ‘Invisible Sisterhood’, had a top ten honorary mention in the Fish Poetry Prize and was published in the Fish Poetry Anthology. writewitthinwales



Ceri Morgan is from Hirwaun but spent most of her adult life working on

Québec fiction. French has become her second language, but she has retained some Welsh, which she studied as an acquired language for A level. She has also retained a strong Valleys accent in English. ‘Boulevard Saint-Laurent’ is the fourth in a series of poems about Montréal, which punctuates an ongoing creative non ction memoir. Set in different seasons and in various neighbourhoods, these play with the layering of cultures and histories in and of the city, time, mobility, gender, desire and language.



Elizabeth Chadwick-Pywell is an English/Welsh poet living in York, whose latest pamphlet, Breaking (Out), was published by Selcouth Station; her first, Unknown, is available from Stairwell Books. She has featured in journals, including Fourteen Poems and Dreich, and in 2022 was longlisted for the Leeds Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Ironbridge Festival Prize, and won the Northern Writer’s Debut Award for Poetry. ~Publisher: *New Welsh Review*