Autumn Bookcase 2018 announced at Frankfurt Book Fair

Autumn Bookcase 2018 announced at Frankfurt Book Fair

10 October 2018

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Wales Literature Exchange will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest international book trade event, held between 10 - 14 October 2018. Georgia will this year be Guest of Honour.

While at the fair, Wales Literature Exchange will be meeting publishers, agents and translators, presenting our new Bookcase - our selection of books which we recommend for translation. This year, nine titles have been selected: each one another world, from Wales.

Brief Lives, six short fictions by Christopher Meredith, is a stylized exploration of time and memory, spanning from the South China Sea in 1946 to the final piece, set nowhere at the end of time.

Other titles from this year’s Bookcase selection also journey to the past. Aled Jones Williams tells of a grieving mother’s personal Nostos, journeying back to the now run-down town of her childhood in north-west Wales, reverting to her native language that alone can encompass her grief. In Hen Bethau Anghofeidg, leading novelist Mihangel Morgan reworks the classic ghost story, while obliquely exploring pressing contemporary questions of linguistic, cultural and economic colonisation and their expression through sexual and emotional abuse. Emma Glass’ debut novel Peach is by turn lyrical and visceral in its treatment of living with trauma in the aftermath of a sexual attack.

In 1966 a coal slag heap collapsed on a school in south Wales, killing 144 people, most of them children. In The Green Hollow, poet Owen Sheers has given voice to those who still live in Aberfan, the pit village in which tragedy struck, and uses their collective memories to create a striking work of poetic power. The Glass Aisle, acclaimed poet Paul Henry’s tenth book, moves between rage and stillness, past and present, music and silence, and includes a moving elegy to displaced workhouse residents, set on a stretch of canal in the Brecon Beacons National Park.

Two crime fiction novels also appear on the Bookcase this year: Gary Raymond’s literary thriller, The Golden Orphans, takes the reader to Cyprus into the dark heart of an abandoned city torn by betrayal, war, lies and a terrible secret. In his ambitious eleventh novel, master of the Welsh noir, Llwyd Owen, pushes the genre’s boundaries with his relentless narrative in Pyrth Uffern (The Gates of Hell).

Manon Steffan RosLlyfr Glas Nebo (The Blue Book of Nebo), which won this year’s National Eisteddfod Prose Medal, thrusts the reader into the future, and a life of survival after a nuclear disaster and questions the structures of the contemporary world.

All nine books will be actively promoted by Wales Literature Exchange at international book fairs, literary festivals, translation workshops and other events through out the coming year.

To read more about these titles and for translation rights details, visit our Bookcase section.

To organize a meeting with Wales Literature Exchange during the bookfair, please contact us at post@waleslitexchange.org