Cawl

Siôn Tomos Owen was born and raised first language Welsh in the Rhondda Valley. After a BA in Creative Writing and Media at Trinity College Carmarthen, Siôn won the Tudor Bevan Bursary Award in 2007, was runner up in the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Competition in 2014 and 2013 for short fiction, won the Young Writer's Prize in the Planet Essay Competition 2013 and was a specially commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition 2014. His writing has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including Ten of the Best, Square, Nu, Nu2, Planet, Red Poets and Cheval and he's performed at many events including the Hay Literature Festival 2009-2014 and a very late night Poetry Slam on BBC Radio 5live.

Consisting of short stories, poems, essays and cartoons and comics, Cawl is an anthology of one multi-prize winning, funny, angry young man’s creative endeavours and social and political frustrations. Traditionally Cawl is a mix of everything thrown into one stew pot and left to simmer, boil over and be savoured. Here Siôn Tomos Owen invites the reader to choose what to taste next. The meat of the essays, the parsnip of poetry, the spud of satire or the OXO cube of comedy.Ranging in genre from gritty realism, macabre, sci-fi and comic writing, his is a collection that can be interpreted as an anthology of more than one writer but written by one author. The poems range from short rhyming poems to long free form but consist mainly of valleys-based Cwm on ‘en but poetry including a centre-piece reinterpretation of Rhydwen Williams’ epic ‘In praise of a valley’ from his Rhondda Poems.The cartoons are a mix of comic strip style social humour and satirical cartoons, heavily influenced by Martin Rowson, Art Spiegelman and Gren.The essays blend humour and frustrated social commentary on Wales and particularly the political situation in the valleys, and are entrenched in stagnant Labour idealism while hoping for change that can only come from the people themselves.