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News from Rob Mimpriss

Proverbs from the Red Book of Hergest | Source
2022/12/13: Pugnacious Little Trolls at the White Review
There are not many extrinsic rewards for Welsh writers. The reading population is small; there are significant financial hardships; we are saturated with material from England and the wider Anglosphere; and even the best of Welsh writing is perceived, with some reason, as unvaried and unexciting. Publishers regard Welsh writers at best with a kind of commercial suspicion, and at worst with political and cultural mistrust...
Read postHome2022/06/18: Rivers of Wales by Jim Perrin
Jim Perrin’s Rivers of Wales, recently published by Carreg Gwalch, joins his earlier books, Snowdon and The Mountains of Wales in combining autobiography with reflections on Welsh heritage and landscape. Among the pleasures it offers the reader are the wealth of his descriptions of writers, naturalists, scholars and adventurers; his recollections of river walks, country pubs and hotels; his vivid and telling descriptions of riverside wildlife; and the wealth of his knowledge of literature, local history, and folklore. Jim Perrin approached me to write the introduction to the book...
Read postHome2022/05/21: ‘Industry in the Country of the Blind’ goes to Culture Matters
In a short story, ‘The Country of the Blind’ by H G Wells, a climber in the Andes separated from his party stumbles upon a highland valley cultivated by a forgotten community of the congenitally blind. These people, cut off in their isolated valley over centuries, have created a way of life so perfectly adapted to their blindness that they have forgotten that sight exists, their eyes have atrophied, and they have come to believe that the valley is the whole of the world, created for their benefit. Dismissing their discoverer Nuñez’s talk of cities and plains and vision as a mark of his apparent madness, and of the stupidity which accounts for his clumsiness and uselessness in their sightless world, they slowly reach the conclusion that his eyes should be gouged out as the evident source of his delusions and madness, before his marriage to the pious and beautiful young woman, Medina-Saroté...
Read postHome2022/02/19: Pugnacious Little Trolls goes to Nation Cymru
Almost a year after its publication, Pugnacious Little Trolls is reviewed by one of the kingmakers of Welsh writing, Jon Gower, for Nation Cymru.
His brief, five-minute article is packed with praise, even so. The stories are ‘freely and fiercely inventive stories,’ a ‘baroque collection of intellectual exotica’ marked by a ‘zestful playfulness,’ and by a ‘grand energy and capacity for invention’ which reminds him of Iolo Morganwg...
Read postHome2022/02/07: A British Triad?
Among the pleasures of reading Welsh literature is Ellis Wynne’s eighteenth-century prose classic, Y Bardd Cwsc (The Sleeping Bard). Written under the influence of Bunyan’s, Dante’s and Milton’s religious epics, and more especially of Francisco de Quevedo’s satirical visions, the book’s three visions of the world, death and hell express a distinctively Welsh perspective on the rise of capitalism and the British state shortly before Scotland is compelled to join the union. Streaked with an earthy comedy, and with cheerfully sadistic descriptions of the damnation of petty crooks and powerful oppressors, the book expresses a powerful rejection of economic inequality, of inherited titles and wealth, and of military conquest...
Read postHome2021/03/24: Close Ties – New Fiction by Rob Mimpriss and A L Reynolds
February 2021 saw the launch of my fourth short-story collection, Pugnacious Little Trolls, alongside Of the Ninth Verse, a novel by A. L. Reynolds...
Read postHome2019/08/01: Reasoning: Twenty Stories
The contact form on my website does not produce much traffic, and what traffic it produces normally falls foul of my email account’s spam rules. But a little while ago, a stranger sent me the message which I quote in part below:
On my way to Bangor station I impulse-bought a fifty-pence copy of Reasoning in a charity shop, just for something to read on the train home. It turned out to be an astonishing bargain...
Read postHomeFeatured Posts
Books by Rob Mimpriss

Pugnacious Little Trolls
‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru

Prayer at the End: Twenty-Three Stories
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine

For His Warriors: Thirty Stories
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com

Reasoning: Twenty Stories
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review

The Sleeping Bard: Three Nightmare Visions of the World, of Death, and of Hell
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.

A Book of Three Birds
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin

Dangerous Asylums
‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’
Philip Gross

Hallowe’en in the Cwm: The Stories of Owen Wynne Jones
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price

Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys