Cardiff BookTalk

I've done some searching and couldn't find any starter packs for Welsh and Wales-based speculative fiction people. So, I thought I'd try my hand at creating one. If you'd like to be included, give me a nudge.

go.bsky.app/VaweQ1D

@cardiffbooktalk.bsky.social

Thanks 🙏

I have been to so many great talks put on by @cardiffbooktalk.bsky.social with my side-witch @perkinskeighley.bsky.social So good.

We're a bit quiet at the moment and don't have any dates in the diary, but there will be some bits and pieces coming soon

School of English, Communication and Philosophy - Cardiff University The School of English, Communication and Philosophy is a multi-discipline School that values critical rigour, creative thinking, and intellectual inquisitiveness.

We also have an archive of our past events on the ENCAP YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/@englishcomm...

There's discussion about authors like Jane Austen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel and many others. We've also spoken to authors including Tessa Hadley, Rachel Dawson, Emma Harding and more

Cardiff BookTalk The book group with a difference

If you're interested in finding out more about us we have a blog here: cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com

YouTube video by School of English, Communication and Philosophy - Cardiff University Cardiff BookTalk: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Quickie introduction and hello to all our new followers.

Cardiff BookTalk is a university book group organized by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

This is us having the time of our lives doing Shirley Jackson in a pandemic: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjEB...

Volumes Visit the post for more.

Volume 10 of Barthes Studies is now available online. All articles are free to read. This year’s volume is a special issue titled ‘Preparations’, guest-edited by Kate Briggs and Sunil Manghani.
sites.cardiff.ac.uk/barthes/volu...

Slough William Hershel, professional musician, amateur astronomer, discoverer of Uranus, built a telescope in Slough so huge it remained the biggest in the world for fifty years.

This is a podcast about the Hershels (also on Spotify etc) - their house (now a museum) in Bath and the huge telescope they built in Slough.

on.soundcloud.com/tX3fspjPHLup...

Fall River is a disquieting mixture of crime fiction with magical realism on the river Tamar in Cornwall and we're thrilled to be discussing it with Meredith Miller at Cardiff Uni's Spark Building on 19 March.

Book your free ticket here: www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/car...

‘Not From an Astronomer’ is about the eighteenth century astronomer Caroline Herschel. Working at a time when women were excluded from scientific discourse, she discovered several comets and was the first woman to publish in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

On the blog right now we're looking at a short story by Meredith Miller, who will BookTalking with us on 19 March.

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2024/02/27/t...

The next BookTalk is on the blog now!

Britain’s Internal Borderlands – Meredith Miller in conversation with Kevin Morgan

More info and booking: cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/b...

Authors Emma Harding and Rachel Dawson discuss their work at Cardiff University's Special Collections and Archives

Catch up with Monday's BookTalk online!

Watch Writing the City with Rachel Dawson and Emma Harding via today's blog

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.

Both novels, Rachel Dawson's Neon Roses and Emma Hardings The Berliners are available now from all good bookshops

We will be back for more BookTalking in 2024!

Thanks everyone who came last night to Cardiff University Special Collections for Writing the City with Emma Harding and Rachel Dawson.

Special thanks to Literature Wales for their support

It’s always amazing to see so many people in the audience engaged with our guests and asking questions

Rachel will be joined by fellow-novelist Emma Harding (The Berliners) next Monday evening for Writing the City

This event at Cardiff University Special Collections is totally free and open to all and supported by Literature Wales

More info: cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/w...

Todays blog: Rachel Dawson, author of Neon Roses, interviewed for Nation Cymru

‘When I write about the liberatory power of finding your community, I’ve been writing for my friends’

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/11/30/w...

Cardiff people: we're Writing the City with Rachel Dawson and Emma Harding on 4 December

It's free, join us join us join us

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/w...

Emma Harding will be joined by Rachel Dawson for our event Writing the City at Cardiff University Special Collections on 4 December

More info and tix: cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/w...

Image shows the book covers for Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson and The Berliners by Emma Harding. For Neon Roses a rose drawn in a pop art style is covered by badges proclaiming radical slogans such as 'out of the closet and into the street' and 'think straight - be gay'. The Berliners shows a woman with a pensive expression gazing at you though cross-hatched layers of darkness and colour

Join us on Monday 4 Dec for Writing the City with novelists Emma Harding and Rachel Dawson. We're meeting at Special Collections and Archives in Cardiff University's Arts and Social Studies Library to discuss their books The Berliners and Neon Roses.

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/w...

‘Cappuccino for Salerio!’ – Emma Harding on adapting Shakespeare for radio Picture shows author portrait of Emma Harding and a cartoon of Yorick (I knew him Horatio!) listening to a quality BBC radio drama on his headphones

Text reads: Emma Harding, author of The Berliners will be joining us at Special Collections and Archives next Monday for Writing the City with fellow-novelist Rachel Dawson. As well as writing her own fiction, Emma has a long career writing and directing for the radio, with a particular focus on adapting classic texts for a radio audience. In this in-depth 2021 interview with Ronan Hatfull, Emma talks about the process of adapting Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice for BBC Radio 3’s Drama on 3 series. She reveals herself to be a shrewd and articulate operator and we’re looking forward to hearing her thoughts on the topic of Writing the City next week.

Text reads: ‘We recorded the whole scene on the move in the studio. Normally, we use static mics and the actors move in relation to the mics. There’s a lot more movement in radio productions than people think, as we use the whole studio space to create a sense of place and perspective, but with this scene, I really wanted everybody to be on the move. So, I had my studio manager with a handheld mic on a boom, and we choreographed it so that actors kept walking around the entire studio space in a circle and just kept talking as they moved.'

Text reads: 'I wanted the sense of early morning, the city people starting work, coffee in hand, coming out into the street, going into the office building – we go into the lift and hear the lift ascending. Then, they meet more people in the office, there are televisions and telephones, and all the noise of a city office. It was partly to create a sense of the busy world of these traders with their ambitions and their kinetic energy. And of course, in contrast, you’ve got Antonio in a slightly different psychic space at this point in the play. I wanted to bring out that generational difference between him and these younger traders.’

Today's blog: ‘Cappuccino for Salerio!’

Emma Harding talks about adapting Shakespeare for radio in this interview with Ronan Hatfull

There's less than a week until Emma joins us for Writing the City...

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/c...

The Berliners shows a woman with a pensive expression gazing at you though cross-hatched layers of darkness and colour

Emma Harding’s The Berliners is a complex, polyphonic novel about the interweaving histories of the inhabitants of an apartment building in Berlin, from the early 1900s to the present day. With a cast of voices including cabaret artists, occult investigators, reluctant pornographers...

The cover of Neon Roses shows a rose drawn in a pop art style covered by badges proclaiming radical slogans such as 'Yes, I'm a homosexual too' and 'radical fairy'.

Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson is a Queer coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of eighties Britain. Her protagonist, Eluned, experiences a sexual awakening when the fundraising group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners comes from London to her Valleys town to support the strike.

There are, as the saying goes, a thousand stories in the naked city. In Writing the City we ask how novelists capture city life. What makes a city feel real on the page? Is it a question of research or an act of imagination? Can we talk of hidden cites, invisible cities, cities of the mind?

Had a fab time yesterday with Rachel Dawson and Emma Harding hatching our schemes for December's BookTalk.

It promises to be a really good one and you won't want to miss it

Novelists Rachel Dawson and Emma Harding will be Writing the City with us at Cardiff University Special Collections in December

More info: cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/10/10/w...

Grace Jones looking fierce on the cover of Slave to the Rhythym. A collage effect makes her mouth and hair look big

The cover of Rachel Dawson's Neon Roses, showing a pop art style rose adorned with 1980s LGBTQ+ badges

Today's blog: ‘…hammer blows delivered by an affable feather-light touch’

In which a Rachel Trezise review of Neon Roses via Nation Cymru gives us an unexpected excuse to completely stan Grace Jones

cardiffbooktalk.wordpress.com/2023/11/14/h...

Nice to have had a tangential part to play in this event last week.

Wars of the Interior is excellent, essential reading. It deals with the violence committed in the name of extracting wood, oil and gold in Peru and tells the story of the activists and indigenous people on the frontline