Rachel Trezise – författare

Went out, got pissed. Same shit, different day.Aberalaw, a tiny South Wales valley village where nobody ever arrives and nobody ever leaves. The new police chief has declared war on recreational drugs, resulting in an eighteen-month drought. The party-loving wives and girlfriends of local punk band, The Boobs, are getting desperate, both for drugs and thrills: Ellie, factory girl with dreams of a better life in New York; Rhiannon, hairdresser with a taste for violence and designer clothes and Siân, unappreciated, obsessive compulsive mother of three.Into their lives, enter the languid dark stranger, Johnny: Englishman, drug dealer and shameless seducer. In the space of just a few months, three women's lives will be changed forever.Prize-winning writer, Rachel Trezise, dissects the morals and mores of a small Welsh village community with a scalpel-sharp pen and an incisive wit.

Recent years have seen an explosion of new Welsh writing for the stage. With the advent of Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru in 2003 and the launch of National Theatre Wales in 2009, there has been a tectonic shift in Welsh theatre and its perception. Wales has famously celebrated its poets and novelists, but in the twenty-first century, it is the playwright asking the crucial questions. Never before have there been so many playwrights of all ages, from across Wales, finding the stage to be the home for their stories.This collection is the first to officially recognise this new wave of Welsh playwrights. It showcases a wide range of forms, themes and political concerns, as well as representing the most exciting voices at the forefront of Welsh drama, taking the temperature on what be considered to be the first golden age of Welsh playwriting.Tonypandemonium by Rachel Trezise The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning by Tim PriceGardening for the Unfulfilled and Alienated by Brad BirchLlwyth by Dafydd James (published in Welsh) Parallel Lines by Katherine ChandlerBruised by Matthew TrevannionFeatured in the volume are the following plays, along with a foreword by Professor David Ian Rabey of Aberystwyth University, and an introduction by the editors, Tim Price and Kate Wasserberg.

Migrants, immigrants, travellers, and holidaymakers feature in Dylan Thomas Prize-winner Rachel Trezise’s second collection of short fiction: in eleven dazzling stories of lives lived on either side of boundaries, and on the fringes of society, is teeming with unforgettable characters whose dreams, yearnings and regrets are at once unique and universal.Orthodox Jewish teenager Levi, having been caught fishing pornography from a waste bin in a Brooklyn Park, is sent to reform school in Israel, his simple pious existence threatened when he meets moon-faced nymphomaniac Tzippy, resident of a nearby psychiatric hospital. Lonely seven-year-old third generation Northern Irish- Italian, Majella, finds solace in her collection of Barbie dolls when her father is murdered by terrorists and her mother is floored by grief, learning to deal with the horrors of the world through child’s play. East German opera aficionado, Silke, faces a life-changing decision when she wakes to find her American lover, Michael, stranded on the opposite side of an impenetrable but hastily thrown-up wall.Here, deep tragedy rubs shoulders with sharp comedy as children come of age and adults come to terms.

Debut novel from Rachel Trezise, winner of the Orange Futures Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. The story of a brutal childhood in the Welsh Valleys.

RACHEL TREZISE grew up listening to the rock stars of the 1980s and harbouring an ambition to write a warts ‘n’ all rockumentary. This is the story of her quest for the perfect band – and the band she found. At a rock gig in a Rhondda pub, she discovered MIDASUNO; a gaggle of Merthyr kids with a ton of conviction and a penchant for neck breaking guitar riffs. She booked a back seat on the tour bus they call Black Betty to track the band as they razed the British toilet circuit... Part reportage, part social history and part memoir: DIAL M FOR MERTHYR records the struggles of a band from the wrong side of the tracks trying to stay afloat in an ever changing musical and social climate.