The Blue Tent

Head of Creative Writing’s latest book launches in Wales

Head of Critical and Creative Writing at the University, Professor Richard Gwyn is launching his latest book in the capital this month.

Described by writer, critic and academic Patrick McGuinness as ‘a mysterious, dream-like story, delicately written with a disturbing undertow, in the best tradition of modern oneric fiction’, The Blue Tent is the latest novel from the award-winning writer.

In a lonely house deep in the Black Mountains of south Wales, a man spends insomniac nights absorbed in the ancient texts left him his mysterious aunt. When a blue tent appears in the field at the end of his garden, his solitary life is turned inside out. But who owns the tent? And, when the tent’s occupants begin to emerge, whose story are they telling?

As his life unravels, the man begins to question whether he is the orchestrator or the victim of his own experiences. Are the stories that guide or steer his life real, or merely the echo of other, possible lives?

Poet, novelist, essayist and translator, Richard Gwyn is founder of Fiction Fiesta.

Alongside his memoir The Vagabond’s Breakfast – a Wales Book of the Year Winner in 2012 – his books include the novels The Colour of a Dog Running Away and Deep Hanging Out, and the poetry collections Walking on Bones, Being in Water, Sad Giraffe Café and Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure. He has compiled and edited two major anthologies of contemporary poetry: from Wales The Pterodactyl’s Wing (2003) and The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (2016). A new book of translations Impossible Loves, from the Colombian poet Darío Jaramillo, will appear in the autumn with Carcanet.

Of his latest book, Richard adds: ‘The novel took a long time to evolve, and isn’t easy to define, in terms of genre. If the book has antecedents, they would be ‘dream’ fictions, such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, or Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel – even, at a stretch, a ghost story such as Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.’

Out with Parthian Books,The Blue Tent launches in central Cardiff on 15 May at 7.30pm at Roath Park Pub, including a question and answer session with the author and Patrick McGuinness.