Robert Minhinnick – författare

Island of Lightning is the latest book of travel essays by the prizewinning Robert Minhinnick, poet, novelist, translator, cultural commentator and environmentalist. In it he travels from his home in south Wales to Argentina, China, Finland, Iraq, Tuscany and Piemonte, Malta, New York, Zagreb, Lithuania and the lightning island of Malta. In conventional travel essays and leaps of imaginative narrative his subjects include the annual Elvis convention in Porthcawl, Neolithic sculptures, the cruelties of late twentieth century communism and its aftermath, rugby union, the Argentinian writer Alfonsina Storni, poets playing football, the body of a saint and the definition of cool. His themes are big ones: the relationship of man and landscape, man and time, man and nature, immigration and war, in one sense ultimately humankind itself. Minhinnick explores with the eye of a poet and the gift of a telling image or metaphor. His walk from Cardiff to the Rhondda valleys is almost geological as he passes through the social and cultural strata of the area's history. His astonishment at the sheer number of people - the scale on which society works - in China, results in an inventive grappling with the hugeness of the world (and its growing problems). At the other end of the spectrum his re-imagining of the life of Alfonsina Storni, her love for Borges and her suicide is a delicate commentary on the personal and the solitary. Readers will be entertained, informed and provoked by this series of essays in which Minhinnick takes his subjects as though holding them in his hand, turning them for new perspectives and understanding.

Richard Parry is a painter who cannot paint, a writer who doesn't write. His obsession is Lulu, that 'orphan off the street', his aboriginal 'green child'. But on returning from Australia to his hometown he finds it has become notorious for the suicides of young people. As Parry tries to connect past and present he is haunted by dreams of Australia and of his youth. Yet is Parry all he seems? Isn't he frankly, 'a bit creepy'? How trustworthy is memory? And what has happened to the vivacious Lulu?Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays, seven volumes of poetry and a novel. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and was formerly the editor of Poetry Wales.

Robert Minhinnick’s square mile on the coast of south Wales is the starting point for a series of pieces which journey outwards to Sicily, Iraq and Burma among other places. They start too in the personal – hospital visiting, clearing a house, covid lockdown – and expand into the universal. And they begin in the everyday and take in life afflicted by the globalisation of society and of the mind. Minhinnick searches for meaning in a world of change, particularly of environmental change which is rushing towards an unpalatable future for the planet and its people.Delirium is classic Minhinnick. Consumerism, poetry, the implacability of the algorithm, local history, nature and much else jostle with each other in this book. The writing is characteristically broad ranging in thought and style, with a poet’s eye for the telling image and ear for the lyrical. From the war diaries of his father and to the depleted uranium of the Gulf War, from the Ford dealership in Bridgend to the ancient dunes a few miles away, sunflowers to Emily Dickinson, this is a kaleidoscopic book which provokes and intrigues.

Wales Book of the Year 2018. Winner of the 2018 Roland Mathias Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. The opening poem sequence, 'Diary of the Last Man', sets the tone for Robert Minhinnick's book, a celebration of the dwindling Earth, an elegy, a caution. His Wales is a touchstone; other landscapes and cityscapes are tried against it, with its erratic weather, its sudden changes of mood, 'a black tonic'. The sequence remembers all the geographies of his earlier work, old and new world, but now unpeopled and the lonely spirit free to go anywhere, do anything, but meaning with mankind has drained away. Yet still alive, and still with language, registering. The rest of the book is filled with voices: of children, of rivers, terrorists, magicians; and voices translated from the Welsh, and from Turkish and Arabic, shared, enriching with their difference, their other worlds. History washes over and washes up on the strand of this Welsh book. It is seen and recognised, it begins to be transformed. In the long concluding poem, 'The Sand Orchestra', the poet returns to his own voice, and to the voice of a Bechstein piano abandoned in the open air, played now by nature, its winds and sand. The last man, who has been looking for Ulysses, is the very man he has been looking for.

Radically lyrical, politically astute, this new collection features six writers whose every word is an act of affirmation. As it must be, for their art to flourish beside one of the world’s great languages.In Alcatraz: Poems from the Contemporary Welsh, we find youthful energies tackling climate change, global extinctions, even human life beyond our planet. Whether in Wales or Palestine, Manhattan or the island of Alcatraz itself, we learn that today’s Welsh language poetry, with its unique perspective, is as valid as any verse in the world. And, possibly, more vital.If these translations take liberties, none are unforgivable. The spirit of each poem remains unblemished. Here, veteran writers, such as Menna Elfyn, Karen Owen and Iwan Llwyd, mix with the next generation’s Iestyn Tyne, Llyr Gwyn and Sian Northey. Alcatraz is an essential work for anyone interested in the good health of modern poetry in the UK.

Duncan Bush (1946–2017) was an ambitious, challenging and self-styled ‘working class’ writer from Cardiff, who spent periods living in France and Luxembourg. Following early academic success, he devoted himself to his own prose and poetry and published several volumes of writings that include Aquarium (1984), The Genre of Silence (1987) and The Flying Trapeze (2012). In both personal and political contexts, Bush’s novel Glass Shot (1991) elaborated on feelings arising from the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and his works more broadly express an interest in cinema and the nuanced influence the USA had on his life. The present volume also contains material by Bush not previously freely available in the public domain, including his largely uncollected translations from French and Italian poetry.

Former Arts Council of Wales Book of the YearFrom Copacabana to urban Yorkshire, from New Mexico to a Welsh funfair, from The Netherlands to the Clare coast, Robert Minhinnick's world is a shrinking one.Its cast of characters includes Rio beach beggars, Madison Avenue literati, saloon-bar poolsters and millionaire scrap merchants. These essays cover a variety of subjects: third world poverty and the internationalism of alcohol, rugby through the eyes of a vegetarian, nuclear power, sunbathing and a thanksgiving dinner for the demise of Margaret Thatcher.But at the core of this collection is a vivid series of attempts to strip away the exhausted mythologies of the writer's own country and the increasingly-packaged places he visits. Whether in the rainforest or the big match crowd, Minhinnick's language, acid, imagist, compassionate, celebrates the people he meets and, fleetingly, defines their lives.

Industrial smoke turns the noon sky black. Beneath its clouds the poorest people in Europe arrange flowers on a dictator's grave. On Avienda de las Pulgas an Oldsmobile slows down for a better view. Emerging from a lemon grove is the last pedestrian in California. At a nuclear plant the only sound is the sighing of photocopiers. Another party of visitors gets ready for a tour. Welcome to Badlands. Our guides are a survivor of Europe's most bizarre political regime, a poet who wishes to be abducted by aliens, and the author himself, reluctant aid worker, tourist with a computer tan, regretting his decision to call in at The Zoo for a quick one. In these essays the writer travels from the impoverished of Albania to the scorched suburbia of Silicon Valley. On the way he encounters a foreign country called England, twenty thousand frozen lakes, and a desert of dinosaur bones. The people of Badlands include Coleridge and Ryan Giggs, Colonel Sanders and Freud, plus a host of minor deities from the numbing world of celebrity. Urban and rural, tragic and absurd, Badlands is a real place. But where the borders of Badlands begin, or finish, is difficult to say.Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.

Charting 40 years of evolving tastes, fashions, cultures, and politics, this anthology spotlights the original mission of "Poetry Wales" magazine: to provide a forum for Welsh writing in English. Today the magazine is a thoroughly internationalist journal, publishing poets from Heaney to Mapanje and translating works from around the world. Nevertheless, in the four decades of its existence, it has kept a sharp eye out for Welsh poets writing with invention, passion, and rigor--and all reflecting, in both major and minor keys, the life of their homeland.

Winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2006Join Robert Minhinnick on a journey across a radioactive planet. Researching the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons, the writer follows a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA into Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Here, he is led into the temples of a deserted Babylon and to what his guides insist is the site of the Tower of Babel.Interspersed with these 'radioactive writings', which seem part documentary, part dream, are essays on a host of different places. Minhinnick pursues Dante through Florence, and searches for a poem given to him by a murdered schoolgirl in south Wales.Berlin, Prague, Buenos Aires, New York, Italy, England, Finland, Canada: this globalised world is simultaneously familiar and bizarre, filled with the background noise of contemporary society yet capable of providing places and moments of utter silence. Jetlagged, culture-lagged, Minhinnick returns to his native Wales, its coastline and valleys as extraordinary as anything encountered in a Babel that might be myth or alarmingly real."a gallery of snapshots; a series of lightening impressions from all corners of the world... Minhinnick's writing is quirky, sometimes untidy, often lyrical, packed with glancing references to literary figures (Dylan Thomas makes an appearance, reminding us that the author edits Poetry Wales) and contemporary events... Not easy to read, but highly interesting to untangle"The Times"On the strength of this book alone, Minhinnick stakes his claim to be regarded as the finest writer working in any genre in Wales today."The Guardian"Minhinnick's eye for beauty and his light touch for description in To Babel and Back are a delight"South Wales Evening Post"… this uncategorisable book by the outstanding English-language poet of present-day Wales... To Babel and Back is an extraordinary achievement."New Welsh Review"Robert Minhinnick is an accomplished poet and his beautiful language shines throughout his work"Tribune"... the result is a white-lightening cocktail that both dizzies and thrills by blending motion and contemplation, beauty and horror, minutes ticking us through our brief lives and eons compressed in Welsh limestone, all topped by the paranoiac unease of a sane man tripping across a suicidal plant... always agile and metaphorically vivid"PlanetRobert Minhinnick is an acclaimed poet and editor of Poetry Wales magazine. He is a freelance writer and also works for the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales.

Author shortlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times Short Story Award 2012.In Albania, Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales, the US, London… people are on the move. Migration and immigration are key issues of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The Keys of Babylon is a collection of 15 linked stories by award-winning poet and author Robert Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe. These stories of migration reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success, failure, fear, indifference and passion. Finally, the stories of each of the main characters come together in the closing narrative, surveying their circumstances on one particular day.Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952, and now lives in Porthcawl, south Wales. He has twice won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem, as well as the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 2006 for his collections of essays Watching the Fire Eater (Seren, 1995) and To Babel and Back (Seren, 2005). His first novel, Sea Holly (Seren, 2007), was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.