‘A enir cenedl ar unwaith?’
News from Rob Mimpriss
1st June 2015: Where the Bird Was Nurtured
As part of a Creative Writing seminar on poetic form, I presented my students with this traditional englyn reflecting on the pain of exile. The location was a seminar room in Manchester overlooking a motorway; the day was cloudy and rather cold:
Ni tharia yn Lloegr noeth oeryn — o beth
Byth hwy nag uyn flwyddyn;
Lle macer yr aderyn,
Llyna fyth y llwyn a fyn.
Do not stay in cold, barren England — ever
For more than the space of a year.
The place where the bird was nurtured
Is the place it will long to return.
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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