News from Rob Mimpriss

13th December 2022: 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.

Even so, my recent short-story collection, Pugnacious Little Trolls, has just been listed as one of The White Review’s books of the year for 2023. Explaining his choice, Emyr Humphreys referred to the range of short stories, in which realistic depictions of Welsh national life are interspersed with ‘fantastical tangents’ into imaginary countries or universes, interrogating the Welsh experience of language, identity, prejudice and belonging without mentioning Wales at all; and to a quality of work which makes Gee Williams’s invocation of Borges seem justified.

You can read his remarks in full, at The White Review’s books of the year page, or Jon Gower’s review of the collection for Nation Cymru, and you can browse the book as you would in your local Waterstones, below:

The White Review Nation Cymru Pugnacious Little Trolls