Richard Gwyn – författare

Lucas, a musician and translator, comes home one day to find a cryptic postcard on his doorstep. This postcard sets in motion a series of bizarre, seemingly interconnected events, leading Lucas and his girlfriend, Nuria, to be kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth century. Seeking guidance from a fire-eater, a band of mythic roof-dwellers, and his deeply skeptical friends, Lucas must figure out who to believe-or who can believe him. In his internationally acclaimed debut, Richard Gwyn takes us on a gripping ride of faith and deceit through Barcelona's Gothic Quarter.

When I opened the door of the flat there was a picture postcard lying in the hallway. It showed a reproduction of a painting by Joan Miró. I turned the card over. Neatly written, in green ink, was what appeared to be a date and time: 20 May–11:00. There was no explanatory message, no indication of who had written the card. The printed details told me that the reproduction was entitled “Woman of the Night.” The painting could be found at the Miró Foundation. May 20 was the next day.Lucas, a musician and translator living in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, comes home one day to find this cryptic invitation. When he appears at the appointed time, he sets in motion a series of bizarre, seemingly interconnected events that disrupt his previously passive existence. He meets the alluring Nuria and they begin an intense love affair. He is approached by a band of Barcelona’s mythic roof dwellers and has a run-in with a fire-eating prophet. But when he and Nuria are kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth-century, Lucas realizes that his life is spinning out of control. The cult’s megalomaniac leader, Pontneuf, maintains that Nuria and Lucas are essential to his plan to revive the religion. While Nuria is surprisingly open to Pontneuf and his theories, Lucas is outraged and makes his escape. Back in Barcelona, Lucas wanders the streets in a drug-and-alcohol induced haze, pining for Nuria and struggling to make sense of what happened to him. He recounts his improbable adventures to his friends, who are wholly entertained by the story and deeply dubious of its truth, an understandable skepticism as Lucas fast becomes the quintessential unreliable narrator. With the alluring and enchanting Barcelona as a vibrant backdrop, The Color of a Dog Running Away is a love story, tale of adventure and historical thriller all rolled into one unforgettable and mesmerizing package; a novel that will beguile and disturb in equal measure.

`There has been a pressing need for a book like this for some time. Gwyn cogently reviews the literature on discourse analysis as it pertains to medical and health matters. Introducing original research from his own studies allows him to vividly illustrate just how important it is to understand the role played by discourse. Students of health communication and the sociology of health and illness will find this book integral to their studies' - Deborah Lupton

In this book, Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people.

Communicating Health and Illness:

Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness.

Surveys media representations of health and illness

Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness

Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine.

`There has been a pressing need for a book like this for some time. Gwyn cogently reviews the literature on discourse analysis as it pertains to medical and health matters. Introducing original research from his own studies allows him to vividly illustrate just how important it is to understand the role played by discourse. Students of health communication and the sociology of health and illness will find this book integral to their studies' - Deborah Lupton

In this book, Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people.

Communicating Health and Illness:

Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness.

Surveys media representations of health and illness

Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness

Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine.

Some Miraculous Promised Land is the story of James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) – the man who painted mountains – one of the most original and outstanding of British artists, whose star shone briefly in the years before World War One.

`There has been a pressing need for a book like this for some time. Gwyn cogently reviews the literature on discourse analysis as it pertains to medical and health matters. Introducing original research from his own studies allows him to vividly illustrate just how important it is to understand the role played by discourse. Students of health communication and the sociology of health and illness will find this book integral to their studies′ - Deborah Lupton

In this book, Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people.

Communicating Health and Illness:

Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness.

Surveys media representations of health and illness

Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness

Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine.

The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America is a new and much-needed bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry featuring 90 Spanish-speaking poets from Latin and South America. Translator Richard Gwyn has selected from post-war poets from Cuba to Argentina, and from established names like Fondebrider to new voices like Carolina Davila.

This collection recounts a number of journeys that the stowaway of the title, a kind of anti-Ulysses, takes around the eastern Mediterranean, journeys that transcend historical time and incorporate elements of the mythic and the magical, as well as actual historical phenomena, from the fall of Byzantium to the Syrian civil war and the emergence of Islamic State or Daish. Sometimes the speaker in the poems is the stowaway himself, sometimes his account is overlaid by a retrospective narrator or the autobiographical interjections of the poet. In this way the stowaway’s story and the telling of it merge in a fragmented, multi-layered narrative. Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure is a richly imagined poetic journey by previous Wales Book of the Year winner Richard Gwyn.

In Ambassador of Nowhere, Richard Gwyn takes the reader on a series of journeys across Latin America, in search of poems for his landmark anthology, The Other Tiger. He is driven through lunar landscapes in Patagonia, walks in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile and travels to a town on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. From the betrayal of revolution in Nicaragua to the victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and the threat of narco gang violence in Mexico, Gwyn’s lyrical, life-affirming account pays homage to a deeply conflicted and paradoxical continent and its writers. Ambassador of Nowhere is also a book about translation, and the multiple representations of reality that the act of translation sets in motion, even as the author struggles to keep his own life on track when confronted by the demons of an earlier existence.