Cymru in the City! : A Micro Festival of Welsh Literature and Culture

Consummate traveller, memoirist and children’s author Horatio Clare has worked as a BBC radio producer of cultural programmes and is also a freelance essayist and reviewer. His first book, Running for the Hills (2006), a memoir of a childhood on a Welsh sheep farm, won him immediate acclaim. Among his numerous travel books, A Single Swallow traces the migration of swallows from South Africa to South Wales, while Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North is set on a Finnish icebreaker. His latest book is Something of His Art: Walking to Lubeck with J S Bach.

Award-winning author of eleven Welsh-language books for adults, three novels for young adults and thirteen children’s books, Caryl Lewis is three-times winner of the Wales Book of the Year. Her latest, a collection of short stories dealing with nature, relationships, love and loss, Y Gwreiddyn (The Root), won the award in Welsh fiction category in 2017. Caryl Lewis has also written extensively for cinema and television, notably adapting for film her own novel Martha, Jac and Sianco. Her TV credits include the Welsh scripts of the successful crime series Y Gwyll / Hinterland and Craith / Hidden.

Poet and prose writer Llŷr Gwyn Lewis is one of the most distinctive voices among the new generation of Welsh-language writers. His debut Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel (Some Flowers of War, 2014), won the Creative Non-Fiction category in the 2015 Wales Book of the Year award, and his first short story collection, Fabula, was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award 2018. He is one of the Ten New Voices form Europoe for 2017, a selection of emerging writers from around Europe made by Literature Across Frontiers and the Literary Europe Live network of European festivals.

Prize-winning author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, three works of fiction, and four volumes of essays on the environment and today’s globalised world, Robert Minhinnick has been influential in changing the shape of the contemporary poetry scene in Wales and in forging an international context for Welsh poetry both as former editor of the magazine Poetry Wales and as translator. His most recent collection Diary of the Last Man (2018) was nominated for the TS Eliot prize and won him his third Wales Book of the Year award. He is also an environmental activist and co-founder of Sustainable Wales.

Academic Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones has worked for over thirty years in higher education as researcher, lecturer and professor in the field of culture, media, language planning, sociolinguistics and creative translation. She is a member of the Council of Europe’s Expert Group on Media for the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages; and is a Director of Mercator International where Literature Across Frontiers and Wales Literature Exchange are based. She serves on boards of several cultural organisations, including the National Eistedfodd festival. She speaks seven languages.

Director of Literature Across Frontiers, Alexandra Büchler is also a translator and editor with over twenty publications to her credit. She has worked as cultural manager for three decades, curating literary events and developing initiatives aimed at fostering literary exchange and translation within Europe, and between Europe and other global regions, notably India, where LAF has been working for a decade. Her most recent translation into English is the Czech modern classic The House of a Thousand Floors by Jan Weiss, published in 2016.

Steffan Donnelly is an actor, writer, and Artistic Director of Invertigo Theatre Company. His work has been seen internationally. Theatre includes seasons at Shakespeare’s Globe, Journeying Boys (Barbican), Pilgrims (HighTide) for which he was nominated for an Off-West End Award for Best Male Performance. Screen includes The Innocents (Netflix), and the movies Bohemian Rhapsody and Darkest Hour.

Jordan Mallory-Skinner is an interdisciplinary artist, working as a composer, sound designer and actor. He also composes for short films and creates sound-based installations in cymatics and interactive sound sculpture for exhibition spaces, including a recent installation at the Southbank Centre.

Tara Robinson is a theatre-maker, director and writer. She is artistic lead of The Conker Group whose work is rooted in a collaborative process with artists and non-artists, is playful in tone and responds to complex contemporary social issues. She has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Gate, The West End (Michael Grandage Company), The Young Vic, HOME Manchester.

The prominent Basque author Harkaitz Cano (1975) has published over thirty books of poetry, short stories and novels, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages, including Spanish, German, Polish and Russian. His novels A Blade of Light and Twist were published in English translation in 2010 and 2018 respectively. His latest novel to date is Fakirraren ahotsa (The Voice of the Fakir, 2018). He is also a script writer and translator and has translated into Basque works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hanif Kureishi and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

Maltese writer Nadia Mifsud (1976) has been living in France since 1998. She writes in the Maltese language and is also a translator between her native tongue and French. Her second poetry collection, kantuniera ’l bogħod (Round the Bend, 2015), was awarded the 2016 National Book Prize. Her debut novel, Ir-rota daret dawra (kważi) sħiħa (Going (almost) full circle, 2017) was shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Prize. A member of the cultural NGO Inizjamed, she co-organises its Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.

Poet, prose writer, authors of books for children and translator from Bengali, Sampurna Chattarji has published sixteen books to date, including a short-story collection about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin, 2013); a translation of Joy Goswami’s Selected Poems (Harper Perennial, 2014, 2018); and seven poetry titles, the most recent being Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins, 2015); Elsewhere Where Else / Lle Arall Ble Arall (Poetrywala, 2018), co-authored with Eurig Salisbury; and – in collaboration with the poet, Karthika Naïr, and the artist, Joëlle Jolivet – Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (Context, Westland Publications, 2018). She is currently Poetry Editor of The Indian Quarterly.

Poet, editor, art theorist and independent curator, Ranjit Hoskote has published collections of poetry including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and, most recently, Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). Hoskote is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work.

Marathi poet, editor, publisher and translator, Hemant Divate has published six poetry collections in Marathi. Divate’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Slovak, Japanese, Persian, Maltese, Serbian, Slovenian, Greek, Hindi and many Indian languages. His publishing house, Paperwall Media & Publishing, has published, under its imprint Poetrywala, more than 100 poetry collections. Hemant lives and works in Mumbai.

Editor, publishing consultant and journalist, Vinutha Mallya is currently Features Assistant Editor with The Pune Mirror.

Dancer, choreographer, theatre director, performing arts researcher, writer, arts manager and curator, based in Calcutta, Vikram Iyengar is co-founder of the kathak-based performance company Ranan and initiator of the Pickle Factory, a new venue for dance, movement practice and discourse. Vikram’s range of work in India and abroad spans productions and workshops with dancers and actors, performance collaborations, research and curation projects for several arts bodies. He was awarded several high-profile fellowships by bodies such as ARThink South Asia, International Society for the Performing Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts.