News from Rob Mimpriss

Proverbs from the Red Book of Hergest | Source

2023/05/06: Reading for Republicans

As a response to the junketing taking place in the centre of London this weekend, Cockatrice Books quietly discounts two of its titles to rather less than the cost of the coronation for the average UK taxpayer. My translation of A Book of Three Birds by Morgan Llwyd, written by a roundhead and Fifth Monarchist during the early years of Cromwell’s dictatorship; and T. Gwynn Jones’s translation of The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne, published just a few years before Scotland’s annexation by England, both reflect on the nature of power and authority, the relationship between religion and the state, the purpose of the British union, and the future of Wales...

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...

2022/06/18: 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...

2022/05/21: ‘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...

2022/02/19: 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...

2022/02/07: 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...

2021/03/24: 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...

2019/08/01: 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...

2016/11/04: Dangerous Asylums at The Carriageworks in Denbigh

4th November 2016: Tea and cake, two songs by Elaine Walker,readings by the contributors, and a supportive and deeply appreciative audience marked a celebration of Dangerous Asylums, an anthology of stories from Denbigh Mental Hospital, in Denbigh itself. The anthology, for sale on [Amazon](https://www...

2016/10/10: Dangerous Asylums at Bangor University

Poster advertising the launch of Dangerous Asylums on World Mental Health Day, 10th October 2016, at Bangor University

2015/11/20: The Short Story – Compression and Resonance

The Short Story - Compression and Resonance

Led by Rob Mimpriss

Friday November 20th, 1-3pm Ucheldre Literary Society, Ucheldre Arts Centre, Holyhead.

The short story has a rather unusual niche in world literature. Its position seems equidistant between the novel and the poem, emphasising resonance, compression and shapeliness of form, and some critics see it as intentionally marginal, exploring the significance, even the cosmic and spiritual significance, of obscure and impoverished lives...