Menna Elfyn Readings
'Elfyn writes about the intimate and every day, the natural world and about women’s experiences, always able to transform her awareness of the small, and the beautiful, to the affective and often, then, the political. Her voice is challenging and compassionate by turn, unafraid of joy, and full of the energies of community, offering through the power of language, truth, consolation, and possibility.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, co-judge of the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards 2022
Menna Elfyn is one of the foremost Welsh-language writers. As well as being an award-winning poet, she has published plays, libretti and children’s novels, and co-edited The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) with John Rowlands. When not travelling the world for readings and residencies, she lives in Carmarthen. She was Wales’s National Children’s Laureate in 2002, and was made President of Wales PEN Cymru in 2014. She was, until 2016, Creative Director in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David; she is also Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2022, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.
Describing herself as a ‘proud bilingual’, she has for the first time in a Bloodaxe collection translated or written many of the original poems in English in her new book Parch, due out in October 2025.
Menna Elfyn was a guest on Radio 3's The Verb on 1 February 2019. She was discussing the subjunctive in Welsh, and reading poems from her 2017 collection Bondo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00028n4. Download the podcast to hear Menna reading an additional poem.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Friday 30 May, 5.30pm
Hay Festival: Freedom of Speech Today (Fara Dabhoiwala, Menna Elfyn and Burhan Sönmez talk to Mererid Hopwood)
Exchange Marquee, Hay-on-Wye
Defending freedom of expression, a central principle of any democratic society, is a main goal of the global PEN network, which was joined by Wales PEN Cymru in 2014. But what does freedom of speech mean in today’s divided world? Three writers and free speech advocates discuss the concept with poet and academic Mererid Hopwood.
£13.00 - More details and tickets here.
[23 May 2019]
