When I take my place in front of my laptop at four in the morning (disgusting hour of the day if it’s for work, yet a sublime hour for languishing in that haze of soporific half-dreaming), I rarely arrive with a solid plan.
Category: News
Gwobr Beirdd Ifanc Cymru yn lansio heddiw! Wales Young Poets Award launches today!
Bilingual competition for 10-17 year olds across the the UK. Cystadleuaeth farddoniaeth ddwyieithog (Gymraeg a Saesneg) ledled y DU i blant 10-17 oed, dan ofal Poetry Wales.
Poetry Wales’ international poetry competition Wales Poetry Award returns for 2nd year
Poetry Wales relaunches Wales Poetry Award for its second year, a national competition to discover the very best international poetry.
Briony Collins and the poems that inspire her
I was very lucky growing up, but not in the way you might imagine. My mother died when I was five and the precise circumstances of her death are still a mystery. When my father wasn’t drowning his grief, he was masking it in anger. My brother and I were emotionally stunted for a long…
Peter Knaggs on the poems that inspire him
Vasko I’ve got it in my hand now, the hefty slab of it, Vasko Popa Complete Poems and I thought I’d have a go at saying summat about it. Now, I love Popa and over the last year he has been the biggest influence over my work. At a fundamental level Popa has altered my…
Elizabeth Porter on the poems that inspire her
When I was a child there was something called ‘Chip Club’ – a leaflet given out at school once or twice a year, from which we could order books. I was lucky, my mum always bought me a book, and in 1974 I chose 100+ American Poems, edited by Paul Molloy. Why? Maybe for the…
A Poetry Library for Wales, Adam Sillman & Rhys Owain Williams (Poetry Wales 55.3)
Why didn’t Wales have one? Where should one be established? Who should be involved? Typically the conversation would conclude in one of two ways: enthusiastically agreeing to boozy plans to open a poetry library ourselves, or reasoning that someone, somewhere, must already be doing something.
Nurture Young Talent: Support our Crowdfunder and help create a new anthology and competition for young writers
We need your help to raise £3000 for Wales Young Poets Award, a new bilingual competition and anthology for young people aged 10-17 across Wales and the UK. The competition will be free to enter and its theme will be empathy. We will produce an anthology that will find a home in every school in Wales….
Katrina Naomi on the poems that inspire her
Whenever I read a new collection, I always copy out poems that I love – I suppose it’s a way of keeping those poems close to me but also, in a more nerdy way, seeing how they’ve worked line breaks for example, and finding out how the poems feel as I type them out. I love learning like this.