Friday, 30th October at 8.00pm: An evening with Fflur Dafydd and Owen Sheers
Fflur Dafydd is a novelist, singer-songwriter and lecturer in Creative Writing at Swansea University. Fflur won the Literature Medal in the National Eisteddfod in Swansea in 2006 for her novel Atyniad (Y Lolfa, 2006). In June this year she was announced as the first winner of the Oxfam Emerging Writer of the Year Award. Owen Sheers is an award-winning poet and novelist. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber, 2004) won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2005 and his first novel Resistance (Faber, 2008) has been translated into nine languages. Together Fflur and Owen will perform their work in a unique bilingual evening of poetry and song.
In association with Academi.
Full Price £6 Concessions £4-20 Swansea PTL £2-40 to cover both events
Saturday 31 October from 10am to 5pm: Gods with Stainless Ears - Lynette Roberts Conference
2009 is the centenary of the birth of Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), the modernist war poet who produced her most important work in West Wales. Organised in association with the University of Oxford, CREW (Swansea University), the Dylan Thomas Festival and Carcanet Press. Conference speakers will include Patrick McGuinness, John Goodby, Charles Mundye, Zoe Skoulding. Angharad Rhys, Lynette's daughter, will talk about her mother's life, and there will be an exhibition of photographs, books and papers from the Lynette Roberts family archive.
Cost for attendance at the conference, including reception, evening poetry readings, tea and coffee is £15 full price and £10 concessions.
Saturday, 31 October at 7pm: Lynette Roberts Reading
An open reading of some of the works of this extraordinary Welsh modernist poet, by fellow poets and admirers of her work, including Nigel Jenkins, Menna Elfyn and Margot Morgan.
Full Price £6 Concessions £4-20 Swansea PTL £2-40 to cover both events
Saturday 31 October 10am – 5pm: PoetCasting
PoetCasting, the UK’s foremost poetry podcasting enterprise, returns to Swansea with an innovative new literature event, and will be in residence throughout the day alongside the Lynette Roberts Conference. At last year’s festival a number of poets were recorded for the project, including Aeronwy Thomas. Come this year and hear the best emerging and established poets writing in the UK today. Hundreds of poems from over 150 poets will be available on iPod Shuffles for you to listen to. To get a flavour of the exciting work PoetCasting does, visit the website at www.poetcasting.co.uk
Sunday, 1 November at 1pm: Reminiscences of Childhood - Adrian Metcalfe
Following its award-winning debut at the Edinburgh Festival, Swansea-born actor Adrian has performed this one-man show all over the world to considerable critical acclaim. It was developed from the short stories and poetry of Dylan Thomas and focuses on a dying man’s attempts to justify his existence. During this journey through his memories, he begins to learn about the transience of life and the joy of innocence, the loss of love and the sadness of regret.
Full Price £6 Concessions £4-20 Swansea PTL £2-40
Sunday, 1 November at 3pm: Friends of the Glynn Vivian Event at The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery - Byron Beynon: ‘Poetry and the Mirror of Art’
As a poet, Byron has often been inspired by paintings, and a sequence of his poems appeared in a Painters and Poets exhibition in Harrow. Here, he will examine how paintings have been used to inspire poets, discuss the shared and arguably mutually beneficial language of poetry and art.
Full Price £6 Concessions £4-20 Swansea PTL £2-40
Sunday, 1 November at 7pm: Booklaunch - Aeronwy Thomas My Father’s Places followed by ‘In Country Sleep’, a lecture by John Goodby
Sadly, this long-planned launch must now be posthumous following Aeronwy’s death in July. Her long-anticipated memoir of her early life, and reflections on her father, has recently been BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It will be presented and placed in context by the author of the most recent Dylan biography, Andrew Lycett. This will be followed by our annual lecture by Swansea Dylan scholar and poet John Goodby, who this year dedicates his talk to Aeronwy, and focuses on the poem ‘In Country Sleep’ which Dylan wrote for her.
Free Entry
For more information, please visit http://www.swansea.gov.uk/
