First Post

The current issue of New Welsh Review, the last under the editorship of Francesca Rhydderch, includes an excellent feature by well-known Cardiff-based blogger Anthony Brockway on blogging culture. It’s timely, too, since this is the first editor’s blogger post for New Welsh Review.

I’m a big fan of blogging culture. I’ve maintained a blog in the past as a writer. And I read a great many blogs on a daily basis – literary and cultural, and political, too. The very best of blog culture is alert, informed and sophisticated. It’s provocative, immediate, sceptical, influential, infuriating and thoroughly entertaining. Bloggers engage with the big, incorrigibly plural world that’s out there. During my own time as a rather modest blogger, my site tracker revealed, to my initial astonishment, visitors from Bangor (Wales) to Bangkok.

This blog is intended - over time and as content develops - to allow NWR to strengthen interaction and links with its current and future readership. It will be a forum to share news about the magazine and the literary culture of Wales. Equally, it will also provide an opportunity to air and share views, and I will be inviting guest writers to post entries here as the blog progresses, too (watch this space). And it’s a conversation. Readers will have the chance to comment, too, and, hopefully, enjoy some lively – and friendly – debate about Welsh literature and, of course, about New Welsh Review, and its directions. New Welsh Review wants to connect with readers, writers, thinkers, organisations and other literary magazines. We’ll be building on the ‘links’ section - if you are a literary organisation or magazine or excellent literary blogger let us know about your blog or site.

In addition to the editor’s blog, we’ll be on Facebook imminently, and I will post a public profile link when this becomes available. If you’re on Facebook do please join us there for news on launches and upcoming issues of the magazine.

The digital future is now a present. Literary magazines, in particular quarterly magazines such as New Welsh Review, face a pressing need to reach out to the wider world and stay in the current. So here we are.