Not a bad place to be: The Significance of Swans hiding between Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems and Richard Llewelyn’s How Green Was My Valley at Waterstones, Cardiff this morning. More copies are on order, apparently, in case this one has disappeared by the time you get there! Diolch, Steffan Glynn, for the photograph.
Ffion Dafis Radio Cymru
It was great to chat to Ffion Dafis, Radio Cymru, about the process of writing The Significance of Swans. You can listen to the interview on BBC Sounds by clicking here.
Marged Berry and Sgribls podcast
I’m very much looking forward to chatting with author Marged Berry about the Significance of Swans for her podcast, Sgribls. Marged has already read the book! In her post on Instagram she says:
‘I raced through this. Protagonist Aeronwy is refreshingly real and relatable, and the writing is pared back, understated but suffused with tension. I was gripped by the story which is both bleak and beautiful. I really enjoyed it and I can’t wait to welcome Rhiannon on the podcast before the end of the year!’
Looking forward to it!
The Significance of Swans in the Abergavenny Chronicle
Thank you so much to Bob Rogers of the Abergavenny Chronicle who not only attended the launch at Waterstones Abergavenny on Friday 18 October but who also wrote a report of the event AND a review for the newspaper! Bob and the Chronicle have always been hugely supportive of my work for which I’m immensely grateful. Readers of the novella may realise that the main character’s home town is a lot like Abergavenny! And many of the landmarks on Aeronwy’s way to Cardigan will be familiar to people to have made that journey by car. Bob Rogers is also a novelist and I’m very much looking forward to reading his novel, The End of the Sky, which has just been released by The Vanner Press.
The Significance of Swans launch at Waterstones Abergavenny
Without doubt, Waterstones Abergavenny is my favourite branch of Waterstones! It’s such a fabulous place to buy books, with the most helpful and knowledgeable staff you could wish for. I was thrilled to be there again with Carolyn Hodges from Y Lolfa. Great audience and excellent questions!
The Significance of Swans launch at Cardigan Castle
A launch at Cardigan Castle, it just had to be done! Cardigan is full of lovely venues for a book launch but the pavilion at the castle worked so well for the launch of My Beautiful Imperial back in 2017 we just had to be there again. It was a fabulous evening and I was so lucky to be surrounded by friends, family and so many supportive people. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who came along.
The Significance of Swans is out now!
I’m thrilled to say that The Significance of Swans has been published by Y Lolfa and is now available from all good book shops, or you can order directly from the publisher here.
We have two launch events coming up where I will be in conversation with Carolyn Hodges, editor, from Y Lolfa. We would love to see you there!
7pm, Saturday 12 October at Cardigan Castle. Free event, all welcome!
7pm, Friday 18 October at Waterstones, Abergavenny. Please book tickets through Waterstones here.
The Significance of Swans
I’m delighted to reveal that The Significance of Swans is going to be published by Y Lolfa in October 2024. The novella started life as a short story which was shortlisted for the Bristol Prize in 2018. Kate Johnson was chair of the judges that year and she encouraged me to develop the story into a longer piece. The novella was entered for The New Welsh Writing Awards in 2019 and was placed runner-up. I am particularly thrilled that the book will be published by Y Lolfa, one of the foremost publishers in Wales.
Y Lolfa was established in the mid-sixties. Their vision was to create a new kind of publishing that would be lively, colourful and provocative. It is a family-owned limited company employing 22 full-time staff in Talybont, a village centrally located near the Cardiganshire coast. Y Lolfa has already celebrated half a century in business, establishing it as a leading Welsh publishing and printing company. You can order your copies of The Significance of Swans from Gwales by clicking here
The Embassy of Chile - a celebration of Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes
On the 31st January 2023 we were privileged to attend a special ceremony at the Embassy of Chile in London to honour and celebrate the contribution of Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes to cultural relations between Chile and the United Kingdom.
Consuelo was born in Chile and was imprisoned and tortured during the dictatorship of Pinochet. She founded LEA, the first public Lesbian group in Concepcion, Chile. She is the author of two single authored poetry books in Spanish, La liberación de la Eva desgarrada (1990) and Arena en la Garganta (2011) and several poetry books in collaboration with other women writers: Las Sirenas andan Solas pero navegan los mismos mares (1990) Ventoleras (1992), Lejos de casa: Memoria de chilenas en Inglaterra (2010) Wonder-Makers: Navigators of the Thames (bilingual poetry, 2015) and Wonder Makers: Navigators of the Thames (bilingual short stories, 2016). She has published many academic and creative articles in journals and edited books in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Poland. She belongs to the ‘Hispano-American Women writers on Memory’ literary group and to ‘SLAP’ (Spanish and Latin American Poets). Consuelo has two master’s degrees, the first in Sociology and Gender, and the second in Literary Publishing. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies. She has worked as an academic, poet, literary editor and human rights activist. She came to live in the UK in 1992 to teach Spanish and Women’s Studies at the University of Lancaster.
Consuelo launched Victorina Press in 2017. My Beautiful Imperial was its very first publication. Since then, the press has gone on to publish many more books by award-winning authors.
It was a wonderfully joyous and moving celebration. You can read more about it on The Embassy of Chile’s own website.
Wales Book of the Year 2022 Celebration
This is going to be a great evening! If you’re in London on Monday 5th December, please join us at the London Welsh Centre at 7pm where we’ll be celebrating Wales Book of the Year 2022. Nadifa Mohamed (The Fortune Men, winner of Wales Book of the Year 2022, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and the Costa Novel Award 2021), Sian Hughes (Pain Sluts) and I (I Am the Mask Maker and other stories) will be discussing our work. The event is free, so there’s no excuse not to be there. Just reserve a space by clicking here. Hope to see you there!
On the Face of It: I Am the Mask Maker and other stories (First published in September 2021 on the Victorina Press website)
This time last year, one of my stories, The Last Flight of La Librairie d’Afrique du Nord was shortlisted for the HG Wells Fiction Short Story Competition (senior category). This year’s shortlist has just been announced – congratulations to all the writers on that list, by the way. When I saw the news, I was momentarily disappointed to see that none of my stories had made it this year, until I reminded myself that I hadn’t entered. I often do this, to my husband’s amusement, so that by now it’s become a bit of an ongoing joke.
Me: (very despondent) I didn’t get on to the shortlist for XXX
Him: Did you try?
Me: No.
What is it about competitions?
Shortly after last year’s award ceremony, the HG Wells competition released their theme for this year’s contest. The theme was Mask. I liked it. It was topical. I was determined to try.
We all have a new relationship with masks that would have been unthinkable two years ago. In the past, we may have associated masks with burglars, terrorists or superheroes, the dentist, Halloween or, if we’re lucky, beauty treatments. But those of us who have been happy to wear them, and who weren’t already working in the medical profession, now associate them with protection. A mask is also visible proof of other people’s concern for our safety. To some extent, (on the face of it?) wearing or not wearing a mask has become a statement of intent, of how one sees the world and our responsibility towards it.
Against such a background, how was I to go about writing a story that wouldn’t be too depressing? Creating a story involves willingly immersing yourself in a time and place, and I didn’t much like the thought of spending more time than necessary in Pandemic Britain. I decided to go on location and travel through time. I went back to Renaissance Italy and began writing about a place which was as far away from the undulating hills of Monmouthshire as I could imagine – beautiful, watery Venice. My central character emerged and the story rolled along. In fact, it did what stories often do; it developed a life of its own. Before I knew it, I had a piece of work that was twice as long as the maximum word count allowed for this year’s HG Wells competition, and no way of cutting it without losing important parts of the story. So there it was: I Am the Mask Maker – a story inspired by this year’s theme but which was, at nearly six thousand words, far too long to be entered for this or most other competitions.
When Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes at Victorina Press agreed to publish a collection of my stories I set about choosing the works I wanted to include. As far as I was able, I tried to include pieces that had been longlisted, shortlisted or had won competitions. After all, someone somewhere had already judged them to be at least passable, hadn’t they? It was only when I gathered them together that I realised something which hadn’t been obvious to me until then: most of my characters seemed to be looking for ways of dealing with, or escaping from, tricky situations. Am I a person who is constantly searching for ways out of tricky situations? I don’t think so. Therein lies the mystery of writing, I suppose.
At first, I hadn’t planned on including I Am the Mask Maker but the longer it sat there next to the other stories, the more obvious it became that it should stay. The central character is (you guessed it!) in a challenging situation. His route forwards is convoluted but in the end he finds his way. In his case, it is the disasters he encounters, and not the successes, which bring about the changes necessary for him to go in the right direction. Isn’t it often the case that the worst events in life and not the best are the ones which bring with them the most valuable insights? I’m holding on to that fragile, positive thought as we approach the end of a second year of Covid.
Do I have a love/hate relationship with competitions? When you are a writer published by a small, independent press, getting mentioned in competitions is often the only comfortable way for you to draw attention to your work, particularly if you feel embarrassed blowing your own trumpet on social media. Used as markers throughout the year, competitions can be valuable incentives to produce work that you might not otherwise attempt or complete. In the end, this year’s theme for the HG Wells Fiction Short Story Competition encouraged me to write the title story for my new book, even if it was never entered as intended. When you’re writing, you’re definitely playing the long game.
I’ve won a few prizes and I’d love to win some more. I’m as thrilled as the next person when I see my name on a list. But it isn’t all about winning. In fact, is there even such a thing as ‘winning’ when we’re talking about the act of creation, whether it’s writing or art or music? Isn’t this why most of us are creative in the first place – because we don’t like the idea of a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; writers inhabit the spaces in between, the grey areas, which are much more interesting.
The last time one of my stories didn’t get anywhere in a competition (because even if you win some, you will almost certainly lose far more), I turned to Jan Morris’s writing; she has a wise way of looking at most things and instantly makes me feel better about the world. She said she didn’t approve of literary prizes at all and that success as a writer cannot be compared to the success of an athlete or a chess player.
‘There are no rules to art, though, nobody is offside, and to my mind nobody should be judged a winner. Not even me.’
[In My Mind’s Eye, Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, 2018 ]
Wales Book of the Year Shortlist
I Am the Mask Maker and other stories has made it on to the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award, Wales Book of the Year 2022. There are two other books on the English fiction shortlist: The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed and Pain Sluts by Sian Hughes. The final results will be announced on 29 July 2022 on BBC Radio Wales. Why not take a look at the other categories too. And don’t forget the Welsh language books!
Jon Gower's review for Nation Cymru
Jon Gower of Nation Cymru very kindly reviewed my new book and you can read more of the review here. He particularly liked the story, Oh, Hanami, saying,
‘There’s a story in this collection that’s so rewarding I wanted to re-read it immediately and, indeed, intend to do so today. Oh Hanami (or Fall Seven Times and Stand Up Eight) chronicles the cherry-orchard-planting-adventures of an octogenarian farmer called Jim, who lives in Herefordshire, with fine views over the Welsh hills.’
Thank you, Jon, for taking the time to review the book.
A conversation with Dei Tomos on BBC Radio Cymru
I very much enjoyed chatting with Dei Tomos on his programme for Radio Cymru recently. Dei has such a breadth of knowledge about so many subjects and he takes a genuine interest in the work of his guests. He makes you feel so comfortable and at ease when he’s interviewing you that you almost forget you’re being recorded. A real professional. It’s a great series. Those of you who don’t speak Welsh are missing out. We talked about my new book of short stories, I Am the Mask Maker and Other Stories. Dei was very honest in his appraisal of the book, which I appreciated, as it’s hard to get honest feedback. He said he didn’t get on with the first story, and one other in the book but apart from that he loved all the others. We came to the conclusion that 9 out of 11 (the total number of stories in the book) wasn’t a bad result! Dei particularly liked the story Oh, Hanami which portrays a retired farmer’s growing obsession with the Japanese tradition of cherry blossom viewing.
For those of you who do speak Welsh, you can hear a recording of the programme here. Mwynhewch!
The Bedford Writing Competition
The new short story, All the Clearing House Darlings seems to be doing well. It has been shortlisted by the Bedford Writing Competition: International Short Story & Poetry Awards. You can read more about the contest here.
The judge for this particular category is Patrick McGuinness and the following biography is taken from the Bedford Competition’s website:
Patrick McGuinness is a poet and novelist, and Professor of French at the University of Oxford. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (2011), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Writers Club First Novel Award, and winner of the Writers Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. In French, it was shortlisted for both the Prix Meedicis étranger and the Priz Fémina étranger, and won the Prix de la librairie Millepages and the Premier Roman étranger.
Hammond House International Literary Prize 2021
I was thrilled to hear that one of my brand new stories, All the Clearing House Darlings, was highly commended in the 2021 Hammond House International Literary Prize, short story category. Entries came from all over the world; the winning and shortlisted entries included work by authors from as far afield as Italy, Ireland, Australia, USA, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Sweden, China, England and, of course, Wales! I feel very honoured that my work will appear alongside authors from such diverse backgrounds. I’m really looking forward to seeing the story in print. It will be published in this year’s anthology of winning work, Stardust, during 2022.
Other categories in the Hammond House International Literary Prize include poetry, screenplay and songwriting.
Copy of ‘I Am the Mask Maker’ donated to Abergavenny Library
I love libraries, so it was an honour to donate a copy of my new book, I Am the Mask Maker and other stories to the library in Abergavenny. It gave me an excuse to visit the library in its new home in the town hall building. What a fabulous location! There are enormous new windows overlooking the market hall, where you can sit and read. And only a stone’s throw from the centre of town. I was very fond of the old building but this new location brings the library right into the heart of things.
This is a photo of Claire Cross accepting my book into its new home. Thank you Claire, for always being so welcoming and supportive to authors. We’re hoping to arrange a reading event sometime in the new year.
Twist & Twain shortlist for ‘The Last Flight of la Librairie d'Afrique du Nord’
It was such a busy time before Christmas that I completely forgot to tell everyone about my story, The Last Flight of la Librairie d’Afrique du Nord, which was shortlisted for the Twist & Twain short story contest at the end of 2021. This story was previously shortlisted by the HG Wells short story contest in 2020 and is now published in my new collection of short stories, I Am the Mask Maker.
The Twist & Twain short story contest is in its second year. Twist & Twain is focused on emerging writers who are looking for a platform to showcase their works and they are based in Guwahati in the State of Assam in north-east India. I love the thought that readers from so far away have enjoyed reading my work.
The result of the competition will be announced before the end of January.
William Keen Whiteway and the sinking of the 'Sagamore'
Today, on the 11th day of the 11th month, I always find myself thinking of William Keen Whiteway, who was Chief Officer of the S.S. Imperial, and whose story I told in My Beautiful Imperial. He served under Captain David Jefferson Davies on the Imperial, and subsequently went on to serve on the S.S. Sagamore during WWI. Davy and William survived the Chilean civil war of 1891, but William would not be so lucky on the 3rd March 1917. The Sagamore had left Boston, Massachusetts on 17th February and was heading back to Liverpool. When they were 150 miles west of Fastnet Rock, they were hit by a torpedo from the German U-boat, U49.
Despite the ship sinking within 30 minutes, every member of the Sagamore’s crew succeeded in getting into the three lifeboats. The U-boat surfaced, and the men were questioned at gunpoint as to the whereabouts of their captain. The men refused to identify him, and eventually the German officers gave up. The submarine submerged, abandoning the men to their fate. The sea had been calm at the time of the sinking and the crew had succeeded in lashing the lifeboats together. But during the night, a gale began to blow, and the boats were separated in the rough seas.
Two of the boats, including William’s, disappeared during the night, leaving a third with 17 survivors on board. They spent 2 weeks drifting, having run out of food and water. Miraculously, they were picked up by the S.S. Deucalion, bound for Cape Town but by then, only seven men were left alive. Of the seven that reached Cape Town, five had to have limbs amputated because of the effects of frost bite.
The other two lifeboats, including William’s, were never found.
William was married to Mary Bird Whiteway and at the time of his death, they lived in 11A, Huskisson Street, Liverpool.
William Keen Whiteway’s memorial can be seen on Tower Hill, London.
My Beautiful Obsession: researching and writing the historical novel, ‘My Beautiful Imperial’
At around 4am, on April 11th 2011, unable to sleep, tossing and turning in bed, I got up, put the kettle on and grabbed an old school exercise book and a pen. On the top of the first page, I wrote the date, then the title, ‘Imperial’, then started writing down what had been slowly fermenting in my head for weeks, months, possibly years: the story of Captain David ‘Jefferson’ Davies.
Even though he was born in 1848 and died in 1914, the person I had imagined into being was, by that point, as real to me as any of my immediate family. His looks, his nature, his way of walking, his mannerisms had all taken shape in the course of almost twenty years’ research. To the extent that Captain David ‘Jefferson’ Davies was known to us children at all, he was always referred to as ‘Captain Jeff’. An image of him had hung on the wall of my grandfather’s workshop, although we hadn’t paid too much notice. We knew he was an uncle from a long time in the past. We knew he’d been born near Cardigan and that he’d been a sailor, like so many in our family had been. We knew he’d sailed a ship called the Imperial and that he’d somehow been involved in a civil war in Chile. We knew he’d retired back to Cardigan sometime before the outbreak of the First World War.
There were exotic stories too, handed down. My grandmother remembered seeing him sprawled in a ditch as she was on her way to Sunday school. According to her, he would routinely fail to make it home at night because he drank too much in Cardigan’s Black Lion. No, no, he suffered from bouts of malaria, responded a more sympathetic aunt. Can you catch malaria in Ferwig, we queried? He drank so much that he cried for a woman he’d left behind in Chile, said some. When he drank even more, he sang entire rounds of Spanish songs and cried again in sorrow, they said. Or hiraeth. Who knew? Yet, he’d captained what looked to me like a seriously impressive ship. All those sharp-tongued sailors and brawny engineers – managing a crew like that would have taken some guts. And skill, surely? And hadn’t he won some medal for his part in the war? He couldn’t have been just a plain old drunk. He must have been more than a layabout? My quietly spoken chapel-going grandfather idolised him. Why? Who was the star of these wildly contradictory stories? Was he all of these characters? Or none? He fascinated me.
My mother was a talented genealogist. Her memory for dates of births, deaths and marriages was second to none. Armed with her scaffolding of basic facts and place names, I set out to fill in the gaps and discover more about who he was and what he’d really got up to in Chile. Why had he adopted the name ‘Jefferson’ and why had a merchant sailor got involved in a war that had nothing to do with him on the other side of the world? I had no intention whatsoever of writing a book. I just wanted to know more about someone who had the same genes as me.
I wish I could convey the excitement of historical research. Does the thought of sitting in an ancient library surrounded by leather-bound records fill you with dread? I was lucky enough to start my research before Lloyd’s Register of Shipping was digitized. On my first visit to the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I was thrilled to be able to turn the pages of those huge volumes with my very own hands, and marvel at my uncle’s name recorded in the loops and twirls of an elegant Victorian script.
Everything came alive with the smell of those century and a half old pages. I saw the person who wrote the record, the room they were in, what they were wearing, the time of day. Queen Victoria was on the throne when that ink was drying. I felt like an archaeologist who scrapes back dirt to find the first signs of a golden torque. They’re not gasping because they’ve found gold. They’re holding their faces in awe because what they can see in the mud is a doorway opening, right in front of them, transporting them backwards in time, to the touch of the person who laid the precious object in the earth and whose breath warmed it for the very last time.
I was hooked. Each time I found new evidence of my uncle’s ships or records of a voyage I hadn’t known about, I felt like a character in my very own adventure. I was a scout on a forgotten trail, picking up evidence here and there, piecing a life back together, making sense of the clues he’d left behind, making him breathe, seeing the world through his eyes.
Eventually, I had reams and reams of information. What was I going to do with it all? I couldn’t talk about him forever. My friends and family had started glazing over. I could see them thinking, ‘Oh, no, not again’. But I couldn’t let him languish in my lever arch files. I’d resurrected him. I couldn’t bury him again without letting him have his moment in the sun. Someone needed to write a book. Gradually, I realised no one else was going to do it. That ‘someone’ had to be me.
Were you always taught to finish what you started? Finish your food. Finish your homework. If I start something I have to see it through. It’s a good trait, mostly. When I put pen to paper that day, I knew I’d started something that I wouldn’t be able to abandon half done. I had to be in it for the long haul. There’s no way out of obsession except through. ‘Through’ over 100,000 words to be exact.
I was working and had family responsibilities so it took me three years of writing, often at four in the morning when no one else was around. Did he drink? Undoubtedly. Did he lie in a ditch? Quite probably. Did he cry for a woman he’d left behind in Chile? Almost certainly. He was also a charismatic leader, a passionate man who stayed faithful to his men in the direst circumstances. He led them safely through a series of events that could so easily have proved fatal for them all.
The very word ‘imperial’ has so many negative connotations today. Without realising that the name refers to an actual ship, some have interpreted the title as a celebration of Imperialism itself and all the bad things that went with it. The truth is far more interesting and complex than that.
Aside from any possible literary merit, am I pleased I did it? Of course. I brought a dead man back to life. At the very least, I’m immensely glad about that.
Rhiannon Lewis’s debut novel, My Beautiful Imperial, was published by Victorina Press in December 2017. In March 2018, it was listed by the Walter Scott Prize Academy as one of its recommended books, alongside the work of established authors including, amongst others, John Banville, Neal Ascherson and Marcel Theroux.