Years after his Sealines residency in Valletta comes Robert Minhinnick's Island of Lightning (Seren, 2013), a collection of prose pieces ranging from 500 to 15,000 words.

Minhinnick writes in the Wales Arts Review that "Island of Lightning is not a travel book, or a collection of journeys. It’s about examination of places where I’ve found myself, and the fruits of close observation. The collection begins in China’s Yellow Mountains, and there are individual sections set in Manhattan, Italy and Babylon. But I live in Wales and it’s vital I write about my own environment. In places the book is intensely local. So the reader encounters Porthcawl’s Elvis Presley festival, a salvage yard in Cardiff, a ‘rainforest’ near Corris, and a stream in Penyfai, where I compulsively trespassed."

Sealines is a Literature Across Frontiers international residency exchange programme connecting port cities across Europe. Amongst the participating writers and translators in 2005-6 were Robert Minhinnick, Fflur Dafydd and Tristan Hughes from Wales. Their participation was organised and made possible with the support of Wales Literature Exchange, Wales Arts International and local partners.