
‘A enir cenedl ar unwaith?’
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:
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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