Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, daughter of Dylan Thomas, dies aged 66

Tributes paid following the sad news of the death of Aeronwy Thomas. Read the full story here.

Forward Prize nomination for Meirion Jordan

Congratulations to Meirion Jordan, who has been nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Read the story 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?

Wales at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, DC

Welsh heritage and culture is to headline at one of America's top arts festivals this summer.