Welsh (Plural)


Book Description

Some of the most exciting writers in and from Wales consider the future of Wales and the UK and their place in it. What does it mean to imagine Wales and ‘The Welsh’ as something both distinct and inclusive? In Welsh (Plural), some of the foremost Welsh writers consider the future of Wales and their place in it. For many people, Wales brings to mind the same old collection of images – if it’s not rugby, sheep and leeks, it’s the 3 Cs: castles, coal, and choirs. Heritage, mining and the church are indeed integral parts of Welsh culture. But what of the other stories that point us toward a Welsh future? In this anthology of essays, authors offer imaginative, radical perspectives on the future of Wales as they take us beyond the clichés and binaries that so often shape thinking about Wales and Welshness. Includes essays from Charlotte Williams (A Tolerant Nation?), Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, The Adulterants), Niall Griffiths (Sheepshagger, Broken Ghost), Rabab Ghazoul (Gentle / Radical Turner Prize Nominee), Mike Parker (On the Red Hill), Martin Johnes (Wales Since 1939, Wales: England’s Colony?), Kandace Siobhan Walker (2019 Guardian 4th Estate Prize Winner), Gary Raymond (Golden Orphans, Wales Arts Review, BBC Wales), Darren Chetty (The Good Immigrant), Andy Welch (The Guardian), Marvin Thompson (Winner 2021 UK Poetry Prize), Durre Shahwar (Where I’m Coming From), Hanan Issa (My Body Can House Two Hearts), Dan Evans (Desolation Radio), Shaheen Sutton, Morgan Owen, Iestyn Tyne, Grug Muse and Cerys Hafana.




Wales in 100 Objects


Book Description

Beautiful collection of essays and photographs, showing Green's choice of the 100 most significant objects in Welsh history. Evoking key moments in Wales' past through tangible, physical artefacts, they include a hand axe from 32,000 BC, William Morgan's Bible and Catatonia's first release. Reprint. Originally Published by Gwasg Gomer in 2018.




Wales


Book Description

Though a part of Great Britain, Wales has its own unique culture including its own language, customs, and folklore. Wales also offers stunning natural beauty, featuring valleys, mountains, rivers, lakes, and hundreds of miles of coastline. This guide utilizes vivid photographs, facts, and sidebars to showcase historic and contemporary Wales, offering an in-depth examination into the country's past, government, culture, and its relation to the United Kingdom. It highlights the country's modern operations, including its current political climate, religious affiliations, cuisine, and arts. Your readers will also learn about pressing issues related to its ecology, conservation, and school systems.




Wales, the Welsh and the Making of America


Book Description

The exciting story of the Welsh immigrants and their descendants who made a disproportionate contribution to the creation and growth of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.




Britannia's Dragon


Book Description

Based on extensive research, The Naval History of Wales tells a compelling story that spans nearly 2,000 years, from the Romans to the present. Many Welsh men and women have served in the Royal Navy and the navies of other countries. Welshmen played major parts in voyages of exploration, in the navy's suppression of the slave trade, and in naval warfare from the Viking era to the Spanish Armada, in the American Civil War, both world wars and the Falklands War. Comprehensive, enlightening, and provocative, The Naval History of Wales also explodes many myths about Welsh history, naval historian J.D. Davies arguing that most Welshmen in the sailing navy were volunteers and that, relative to the size of national populations, proportionately more Welsh seamen than English fought at Trafalgar. Written in vivid detail, this volume is one that no maritime or Welsh historian can do without.




101 Rare Plants of Wales


Book Description

Wales has a rich and varied flora of about 1200 native and anciently-introduced flowering plants, conifers and ferns. 101 Rare Plants of Wales celebrates 101 of our rarer Welsh plants, summarises what is currently known about them and aims to raise their profile in the national consciousness.




The Long Field


Book Description

For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”




Benighted


Book Description

In this classic novel of psychological terror, an unrelenting storm forces three travelers to take shelter in a sinister mansion. A powerful storm rages through the Welsh mountains, driving three travelers off the road. Philip Waverton, his wife, Margaret, and their friend Roger Penderel are desperate to get out of the torrential downpour. Their only option is a mysterious old mansion, home to the bizarre Femm family and their brutish butler, Morgan. Although the Femms have plenty rooms in their home, they are hesitant to allow guests to stay in them. Instead, Penderel and the Wavertons must settle in for the night by the ground-floor fireplace and hope the storm will pass by morning. But as the hours go by, their situation only gets worse. The storm intensifies, and the dark house begins revealing its secrets—like what lies behind the two locked doors on the top floor. Now the travelers can only pray they survive until morning . . . Published in 1927, Benighted served as the basis for the 1932 James Whale film The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, and Gloria Stuart. It was J. B. Priestly’s second novel. “Priestley’s book is a beautifully written affair, oftentimes thrilling and touching, that this reader found perfect company during a few recent stormy days in late October. . . . The novel will surely manage to chill the modern-day reader.” —Fantasy Literature




The Fascist Party in Wales?


Book Description

For decades, otherwise highly respected figures in Welsh life have repeatedly claimed that Welsh nationalists sympathised with Fascism during the dark days of the 1930s and the Second World War. In this path-breaking book, Wales's leading political commentator assesses the truth of these charges. In addition to shedding new light on the attitudes of Plaid Cymru and its leadership during the period in question, this book offers an insightful and challenging interpretation of the nature Welsh political culture.




Slave Wales


Book Description

Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. Welsh commodities, like copper and brass made in Swansea, were used to purchase slaves on the African coast and some Welsh products, such as woollens from Montgomeryshire, were an important feature of plantation life in the West Indies. In turn, the profits of plantation agriculture flowed back into Wales, to be invested in new industries or to be lavished on country mansions. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1650 and 1850, bringing the most up-to-date scholarship on Atlantic slavery to bear on the Welsh experience. New research by Chris Evans casts light on previously unknown episodes, such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in nineteenth-century Cuba, and illuminates in new and disturbing ways familiar features of Welsh history - like the woollen industry - that have previously unsuspected 'slave dimensions'. Many Welsh people turned against slavery in the late eighteenth century, but Welsh abolitionism was never a particularly powerful force. Indeed, Chris Evans demonstrates that Welsh participation the slave Atlantic lasted well beyond the abolition of Britain's slave trade in 1807 and the ending of slavery in Britain's Caribbean empire in 1834.