Creative Minds holds author talk

The Wales Book of the Year winners, Richard Gwyn and Patrick McGuinness, will be interviewed about their respective works

Cardiff University’s Creative Minds festival is hosting a discussion evening with the winning authors of the 2012 Wales Book of the Year award.

On 22 November at 8pm, Richard Gwyn and Patrick McGuinness will be interviewed about their respective prizewinning titles, The Vagabond’s Breakfast and The Last Hundred Days. The interview will be held in the Humanities Building, Cardiff University.

Gwyn’s book, a memoir about his own reckless wanderings around the Mediterranean during the 1980s, won the award for creative non-fiction. McGuinness’s novel, which describes the unravelling of the communist system in Romania, won the fiction award.

Event organiser James Vilares says, “These are two of the most high-quality texts published by Welsh authors this year and provide a valuable assessment of where Welsh literature is.”

Creative Minds:

Cardiff University’s Creative Minds festival encompasses a varied programme of lectures, discussions, exhibitions, concerts and recitals. It began in October and will continue until mid-December. All events are open to the public and most are free.

Wales Book of the Year award:

The winners of the 2012 Wales Book of the Year award were announced on 12 July. Patrick McGuinness was proclaimed the overall winner.

Worth a read? Alt. Cardiff’s verdict on the prizewinning books:

The Vagabond’s Breakfast by Richard Gwyn

Gwyn’s memoir is at once intensely personal, terrifyingly funny and rooted in self-accepting realism. The book charts his wait for a liver transplant while reflecting on the richly varied tangents of his life journey. His vagabond years spent traipsing around the Mediterranean are relayed with humour, thoughtfulness and a mild sense of self-disparagement.

Split into highly readable, bitesize chapters, this deeply-layered and thought-provoking text is a must-read for those who appreciate good writing and new ideas.

The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

Written from the perspective of an unnamed British narrator, this book is about the last hundred days of Ceausescu’s communist reign in Romania. Past traumas and grievances in the narrator’s own life are pitted expertly against the grim backdrop of Romanian communism. Vivid characters spring to life in the pages of this novel from Leo, the seedy black-marketeer, to Sergui, the elderly and erudite Romanian gentleman.

McGuinness, who lived in Bucharest during the time of Ceausescu, writes with clear authority and painstaking attention to detail. Sinister and engrossing, this tightly controlled novel draws the reader into an odd, secretive world.

About the authors:

Richard Gwyn was born and grew up in South Wales. He is currently the Director of the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University. In addition to various collections of poetry, he has written two novels: The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2005) and Deep Hanging Out (2007).

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia and grew up in Iran, Venezuela, France, Belgium and Romania. As well as being a prolific poet, he is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University. He lives in Caernarfon.