Richard Gwyn – författare

`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.

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.

In a lonely house deep in the Black Mountains of south Wales, a man spends insomniac nights absorbed in the ancient texts left him by his mysterious aunt.