Our Bookshelf
Browse our Bookshelves, selected annually by the Exchange as a window to recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.
‘A beautiful book. Richard Gwyn writes with a poet’s senses — the keen eye, the impeccable ear — but in his travels he is a translator, and not only of great poems, but also of whole cultures and worldviews. His vision of Latin America is generous, clear-eyed and wise.’
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
“Gwyn’s prose is lyrical without being indulgent… evocative and poignant… Ambassador of Nowhere embraces rather than laments this sense of ongoingness, treating life itself as the ultimate poem to be translated…”
Josh Weeks, Times Literary Supplement
“Gwyn’s latest book is a fascinating and multilayered enterprise. It intersperses the personal with the literary, the political with the social, and takes the reader through multiple landscapes and discoveries.”
Leo Boix, Morning Star
“A wonderfully rich and immersive tour through the lands and literatures of Latin America… Gwyn explores translation and alcoholism, history, mortality and Welsh identity with the same acute and generous eye.”
Tom Bullough, Wales Book of the Year winner 2024
“Richard Gwyn is a keen explorer of Latin American maps, as attentive to small anecdotes as he is to the larger conflicts that define a society… To accompany this empathetic traveller, tragicomic chronicler and passionate scholar of an entire continent is a rare pleasure…”
Andrés Neuman
Ambassador of Nowhere
In Ambassador of Nowhere, Richard Gwyn charts his journey across South America in search of poems for his landmark anthology, The Other Tiger. Criss-crossing the continent, he is driven through lunar landscapes in Patagonia, walks in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile, and travels to a town on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. From the betrayal of revolution in Nicaragua to the victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and the threat of narco gang violence in Mexico, Gwyn’s lyrical, life-affirming account pays homage to a deeply conflicted and paradoxical continent.
Ambassador of Nowhere is also a book about translation, and the multiple representations of reality that the act of translation sets in motion, even as the author struggles to keep his own life on track when confronted by the demons of an earlier existence.
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(2024)
Seren (2024) | 978-1781727775
370pp
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(2024)
Seren only holds English language rights only. All other rights remain with the author via Anna Webber of AM Heath: anna.webber@amheath.com
Reviews
‘A beautiful book. Richard Gwyn writes with a poet’s senses — the keen eye, the impeccable ear — but in his travels he is a translator, and not only of great poems, but also of whole cultures and worldviews. His vision of Latin America is generous, clear-eyed and wise.’
Read more reviewsJuan Gabriel Vásquez