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Available: 15 May 2009

isbn 978 1905762 750 - £14.99

Almanac

The Yearbook of Welsh writing in English 2009 No 13

Almanac: The Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English is a stimulating academic journal featuring new research by established and emerging critics in the field. Almanac aims to engage in a lively and informed way both with the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing, looking towards the future and outwards towards the rest of the world.

This edition includes two incisive and innovative essays on the towering figure in modern Anglophone Welsh poetry, R. S. Thomas, relating his work to that of W. B. Yeats and to Irish writing generally. It also offers important new critical evaluations of unjustifiably neglected literary figures, namely Hilda Vaughan, William Emrys Williams and Nigel Heseltine. The science fiction of the Welsh-language writer, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, is subjected to probing analysis, while the turn-of-the-century London-Welsh magazine, The London Kelt, reveals much about the construction of Wales in exile. Finally, the early issues of Poetry Wales are found to be more international in outlook than previously assumed. The edition also includes the indispensible annual bibliography of criticism in the field. All in all, Almanac continues with its mission to engage with and stimulate its readers with a range of thought-provoking and illuminating new material.

The approaches of the essays are fresh, innovative, expansive and exciting. The increasingly outward gaze of the critical study of Welsh writing in English is to be applauded, as is Almanac for providing an opportunity to do so.- Sarah Morse, New Welsh Review

[Almanac] is testimony to the vigour and energy of the subject
The number of young scholars making vital contributions to this volume (and the wider activities of this field) is enormously exciting – as is their work - Kirsti Bohata, Planet