Coming up this spring

Currently working on my last issue of New Welsh Review. Much to enjoy, I hope, with new writing from Gillian Clarke, Rhys Thomas, Gwyneth Lewis, Boyd Clack, Catherine Fisher, Matthew Jarvis, Zoe Brigley, Gerard Woodward, John Barnie, Simon Harris, Robert Minhinnick, Rachel Trezise, Kathryn Maris, Alison Brackenbury and more – as well as a little something from the editor herself. Plus: photo essay and our reviews pages. More details coming soon!

Happy New Year - Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!

New Welsh Review wishes you all a Happy New Year. Good things to come in 2011 – and some changes afoot for me and this magazine. Here's to 11 – the lucky number of unity, resolve and fortune – and may it serve you well for the year ahead. More posts soon.

2010 Endnote

One of the most extraordinary aspects of this job is the way in which each individual issue is so very many months in the making. Six months, to be specific. And there I am, with my spreadsheet of delicately balanced and honed deadlines. Chasing. Saying grace. Waiting to exhale. It’s no romance, but, you know, it really is a love story – mapped by Excel. And I know every dramatic cell by rote.

The downside of editing and producing a literary quarterly in an age of immediacy, where life is tweeted and you’ll be lucky for a single to land more than two weeks at the top of the charts, is that so much currency - or 'sense' of such – is inevitably lost. I’ve been approached with proposals for topical reviews or articles on countless occasions and have had to explain that currency for this moment won’t equate to currency for the magazine months down the line, when copy will actually appear. You have to opt for style over fashion. Ah well, I'll share a secret: I've always been a fan of that approach anyhow.

Of course, a little calculation reveals that if each issue is six months in the making and four appear in a year, issues are conceived, commissioned, edited and set in an eternal overlap.

Or should that be infernal?

When I first became editor of New Welsh Review, I was frustrated by the sheer lack of space. Head space. Breathing space. Space, space. There is no editorial, commissioning or production support. Editing copy for one issue, while punting out ideas for the next at the same time, can leave one with a haunted (hunted?) look. And all the time, the clock: ticking, ticking. But, as is often the case, perversely, the things that start out as the bane become the beauty. In a sense, it is as if the magazine, while lacking some 'currency' by the limitations of the form, has its own little eternity. Nothing stops. And where, now, did this magazine actually begin? 1988, by our records, but it's hard to believe it was that short a time ago. And while its eternity simply is, each issue is self-contained. In some strange sense, this routine and each issue's sense of belonging to itself, liberates the editor from a sense of ownership – which is the worst thing that can happen to any literary magazine. Guardianship is what it is all about.

Our winter issue is out – and no sooner out than the next is well into production. Of course, the next issue, published in the spring, is a little different for me this time. It will be my last. And so, while the magazine itself doesn’t stop, this is where, for most people, I suppose I step off, at least in theory.

Despite the unexpected sadness putting this last issue into place (a sadness which should have been perhaps entirely expected), I am looking forward to my remaining months in post until this spring and am still certain that the time is right for me to move on to my own projects and my own creative life, a decision I made early this year. Would that we could be so many people and serve so many purposes all at the same time.

This has been a wonderful year for New Welsh Review – and for me on a personal level. We’ve come through, despite a crippling recession. We’ve continued to publish the very best names around. We’ve participated in some great events. We’ve had enormous fun, for all the hard work. It's been fulfilling, joyful – and the sun shone at Hay.

I want to thank all our engaged readers and our gifted writers. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. More in January.

The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

To celebrate National Poetry Day on 8th October 2010, the English Association announced the inauguration of a new biennial prize of £500 for a distinctive first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland – in the first instance between January 2008 and June 2011.

The Prize has been established by some of his colleagues at Nottingham Trent University, in honour of the Liverpool-born poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour, aged 43, in May 2009.

Michael Murphy’s first volume of poetry, After Attila, appeared from Shoestring Press in 1998 when he was 33. Shoestring has published two subsequent collections, Elsewhere (2003) and Allotments (2008), and will bring out a posthumous Collected Poems in 2011. In 2001 Michael was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by Poetry Review as ‘New Poet of the Year’. The intention of the present prize is to extend the same recognition to another new poet.

The adjudicators for the first award will be:

Poet and critic Deryn Rees-Jones (Michael’s widow)
Poet and literary historian Gregory Woods
Poet, translator and publisher Anthony Rudolf

I met Michael, once, briefly, many years ago, when we were both nominated for the Dearmer Prize, which he deservedly won. I remember him being so very happy and proud that night. It is terribly cruel that within the decade he would succumb to cancer. This prize is a fitting tribute to his memory and his craft.

For further details on how to have a collection considered for the prize, click here.

New Welsh Review seeking next editor, commencing March 2011

The closing date for applications for the post of editor of New Welsh Review is fast approaching – 3 November 2010.

You'll need enthusiasm, energy, tenacity, and a strong understanding of the tradition of Welsh writing in English, as well as the finest of literary writing from Wales today. Likewise, you should be in a position to contextualise Welsh writing in a wider UK and European context. You'll also require confidence, independent thinking, strong organisational skills, grace under pressure and a can-do, self-starting approach. The ability to network and form strong professional relationships with writers, academics, thinkers and other organisations is an absolute must.

This is a wonderful and quite unique opportunity for the right person. If you think you've got what it takes to be the next steward of Wales's literary magazine, which encompasses features, fiction, poetry and literary criticism, visit the New Welsh Review website.

Meanwhile...

Over at Wales Home, Patrick McGuinness has an article rightly bemoaning the lack of mainstream arts coverage in Wales. It's an interesting piece and raises important – and familiar – points regarding the lack of mainstream arts coverage in broadcast and, of course, the lack of a daily broadsheet in Wales. Years ago, I heard rumours that there was a plot afoot to set up an exciting broadsheet in Wales. It never did happen. With the current climate, it's unlikely to in the foreseeable future.

But, of course, all's not exactly rosy over the border.

In recent years, the book review pages of the broadsheets have become that much more slender (and less rigorous). Less commercial titles – particularly volumes of single-authored poetry – have been jettisoned. When the BBC recently commissioned a poetry season (screened through spring to autumn last year) it was something of an event – one of the rare instances over the last decade when original arts programming was commissioned on such a scale, and for national broadcast, too. With the exception of the Culture Show and the Review show, those hungry for arts coverage on the Way We Were will have to largely content themselves with repeats from the golden era of the seventies, which, if they're lucky, they'll accidentally catch on BBC4. If you want more on the Way We Live Now, you'll be going to bed on an empty stomach, by and large. So, I don't think the limitations on a comprehensive, vibrant arts scene in broadcast or print media is a problem for Wales alone, although it's certainly true that Wales could be said to be in extremis.

I think Patrick raises particularly important points (in the piece and the ensuing comments) with regard to education and how this impacts upon the cultural consciousness and those who will come to be the future's opinion formers. Not so much making a case for drilling children in valley writing or the legacy of women's writing from Wales by rote. Who'd want that? No. More a case of making them aware of it in the first place. How many are? I wasn't. It takes a lot of effort and bloody-mindedness to find your way alone. Is that how tradition and culture should come to you? I wonder.

Anyhow, you can find the piece and the comments here.

Coming up in Issue 85 - published next month

Issue 85 of New Welsh Review will be published next month and includes Byron Rogers on (auto)biography, Jasmine Donahaye on migration, Lucie Armitt on Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger, John E. McGrath on National Theatre Wales, Meirion Jordan on poetry and history, and Stevie Davies on researching her forthcoming novel, Into Suez. Fiction comes from Robert Minhinnick and Tyler Keevil, with new poems by Pascale Petit, Kelly Grovier and Claire Crowther, among others. All this plus reviews of the very best writing from Wales. To subscribe to New Welsh Review click here.

Oxfam Bookfest - Fflur Dafydd and Deborah Kay Davies at the Wales Millennium Centre

Wales Book of the Year winner Deborah Kay Davies and Fflur Dafydd, who won the Oxfam Emerging Writers Award 2009, will join Peter Florence tonight at the Wales Millennium Centre from 6.30 pm to discuss their work. I've been hugely impressed with both writers' work – Deborah Kay Davies's Grace, Tamar and Laszlo and Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints. Highly recommended.

Tuesday 14 July, 6.30 pm - 8.00 pm
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff (Seligman Room)
Tickets available at the door or pre-ordered from Academi
(Tel: 029 2022 2275)

Email submissions

A reminder that we are now receiving email submissions for poetry and fiction – our way of making submissions more convenient and saving trees.

Please note that we can only consider six poems in any three-month period or one piece of short fiction (2500-3000 words). Due to the amount and high quality of work we receive, potential contributors are strongly encouraged to read the magazine prior to submitting their work. Please ensure that you include a covering letter with your submission.

Email submissions may be sent to submissions [at] newwelshreview.com

TV Matters and Culture Coming Out of the Closet

A blog post over at The Kenyon Review on the power of television in bringing literature to the people, picking up on the sales hike for poets featured on the Beeb's recent poetry season. Myself, I've been fairly astonished at the number of friends and acquaintances, unlikely suspects many, who've tuned into, and actually (whisper it, now) enjoyed, the season. Could it be that Britain is secretly home to many thousands of people whose interests actually extend beyond Kerry Katona's lipo?

The season was, on the whole, stylishly executed. A few misfires, sure – the Donne programme had rather a little too much of Fiona Shaw, and an Eliot documentary, sanitised as it was, managed to make one of the most self-contradictory and complex figures in twentieth-century literature seem quite squarely dull – but some expert negotiation of the difficulties of balancing accessibility with intelligence elsewhere.

I hope the season's success will prompt the BBC to start regularly developing more of the programming that once marked them out as a gold standard of arts broadcasting in the world, rather than be simply regarded as an exception, a curio.

Let's have contemporary writers and other artists talking about the tradition. Let's have contemporary writers and other artists talking about the now, while we're at it. Can someone rescue Monitor from the archives and press play? Can someone develop a Monitor fit for the twenty-first century?

Required reading?

Scottish literature cut out of English GCSE syllabus
You may now turn over your papers and begin.

Facebook

We're now on Facebook - please do come and join us there.

Baylit 2008 - Poetry, Prose and Pinot Grigio

As part of Baylit 2008: Shock of the New, I'll be hosting an event which celebrates the considerable talents of our best young writers.

Poetry, Prose and Pinot Grigio will feature readings from Zoe Brigley, Meirion Jordan, Louise Walsh, Tom Anderson and Joe Dunthorne - all of whom are making waves on the Welsh literary scene, and beyond.

Join us at 7.30pm on Wednesday 8 October, at Bar One in the Millennium Centre, to discover some of the freshest and most vital voices Wales has to offer. The event is likely to be very popular. Visit the Academi website or email post@academi.org for further details, and to book tickets for this and other events taking place during Baylit 2008.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Current Issue of New Welsh Review: Digital Cultures

The current issue of New Welsh Review, Digital Cultures, and the last issue edited by Francesca Rhydderch, is out now. It includes Gary Owen on the genesis of his play from YouTube to a London stage, Anthony Brockway on blogging culture, Peter Lord on the life and work of Clifford McLucas and Dannie Abse introducing a newly revised version of his poem 'The Abandoned'. Plus poems from Stephen Knight, Philip Gross, Maura Dooley and Anna Wigley, new fiction from Candy Neubert and Alix Nathan, and reviews of Lynette Roberts, Kathryn Simmonds, Peter Finch, Penny Simpson and Lewis Davies, among others.

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.