Menna Elfyn Launch Readings
A shimmering, sublime gathering of poetic work.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine, on Parch
Menna Elfyn's new collection Parch was published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2025. She gave early launch readings at Berwick Literary Festival and at Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh on 11 and 13 October, and will be reading at a number of festivals and venues across Wales this autumn. Her online launch with Bloodaxe on 21 October is now available to via YouTube - scroll down for details.
Parch is Menna Elfyn’s sixth poetry book from Bloodaxe and for the first time includes many poems written in English and some in her own translation. Other poems in the collection are translated by Emma Baines, Joseph P. Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas.
Her previous five books of poetry with Bloodaxe are all dual-language. Her 2007 retrospective Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems was followed by two further Welsh-English collections, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; and Bondo (2017).
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 received a Cholmondeley Award in 2022, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.
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'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
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Menna Elfyn’s new collection Parch was given a brilliant early review in Mab Jones’ September 2025 poetry column in Buzz Magazine Wales. Read in full here.
‘The word ‘parch’ holds a double meaning: ‘respect’, in Welsh, and associations of thirst or dryness in English. Menna Elfyn’s new collection dances beautifully in that dual space, shifting between reverence and acting as a record of truth; honouring the past yet also inscribing something new. […] All of which makes reading Parch like leafing through some amazing, modern illuminated text that’s still being written. This is a reverent, resonant, real-life-loving collection that looks backward, sideways, upwards, downwards, and forwards, all at once. A shimmering, sublime gathering of poetic work.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
Menna Elfyn's poem 'Storm in Brooklyn Subway' from Parch was featured as Carol Rumens' Poem of the Week in The Guardian of 27 October 2025. Read here.
'It seems that the interplay of Welsh may have helped produce lightning and luminosity in Elfyn’s English-language poetry.’ – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian
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Menna Elfyn read and introduced her specially commissioned poem ‘Horse Chestnut Tree in Uppsala 2022’ on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb on 17 February 2023 as part of their Something Old, Something New feature marking the BBC Centenary. Unusually for her, she wrote this first in English and then translated it into Welsh - Menna was asked to read the final stanza in Welsh. The poem is now included in Menna Elfyn’s sixth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Parch, published in October 2025.
The poem is available on BBC Sounds as a separate clip here.
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FORTHCOMING READINGS
Thursday 4 December, 6.30pm
Palas Print, Caernarfon
Menna Elfyn & Sally Baker
Launch of Parch and reading with Sally Baker, former director of Tŷ Newydd writing centre.
Email siop@palasprint.com to book your place.
PAST EVENTS
Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7pm
Bloodaxe October online launch event
Menna Elfyn joined Kit Wright as they read from their new books and discussed them with Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This event also features audio recordings of Selima Hill reading from her new collection. Menna read first in each set.
Watch below or on our YouTube channel.
Reading at Berwick Literary Festival 2025
Menna Elfyn read from her Bloodaxe collection Parch at Berwick Literary Festival on Saturday 11th October 2025.
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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.
[23 May 2019]
