Thursday 2 November – 18:00-19:30
Mumbles Tabernacle, SA3 4AR
A special evening of performance and conversation honouring the late critically-acclaimed Gower writer, scholar and teacher Nigel Jenkins.
Introduced by award-winning Welsh writer Jon Gower, join us for the launch of Wild Cherry: Nigel Jenkins’ Selected Poems (Parthian Books). This posthumous volume brings together a selection of Nigel Jenkins’ poetry from across his career, selected and edited by Wales Book of the Year winner Patrick McGuinness.
The Evening will also include the announcement of the Hmm Foundation-sponsored 2023 winner of the Nigel Jenkins’ Award for the MA in Creative Writing at Swansea University.
About the author
Nigel Jenkins (1949-2014) was one of Wales’s leading writers: a poet and essayist, he was also political activist, a teacher and a mentor. He first came to prominence as one of the Welsh Arts Council’s Three Young Anglo-Welsh Poets (1974). In 1976, he was given an Eric Gregory Award by the Society of Authors. This was followed by numerous poetry collections, including Song and Dance (1981), Blue: 101 Haiku, Senryu and Tanka (2002) and Hotel Gwales (2006). His poetry has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Dutch and Russian, and his translations of modern Welsh poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies worldwide, including The Bloodaxe Anthology of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003).
A former newspaper journalist, Jenkins was an accomplished writer of prose. In 1996, he won the Wales Book of the Year prize for his travel book Gwalia in Khasia (1995) – the story of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists’ Mission to the Khasi Hills in north-east India (1841–1969). Jenkins also edited an accompanying anthology of poetry and prose from the Khasi Hills, Khasia in Gwalia. In 2001, he published a selection of his essays and articles as Footsore on the Frontier and, in 2008, and his first psychogeographical guide book Real Swansea was published followed by Real Swansea Two (2012) and Real Gower (2014).
Nigel was elected as a bard to the Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain in 1998. He was a co-editor of the Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (2008). A highly respected pioneer of the haiku in Wales, he also co-edited the country’s first national anthology of haiku poetry, Another Country in 2011.
About the editor
Patrick McGuinness is the author of two previous books of poetry, two novels, The Last Hundred Days and Throw Me to the Wolves, and a non-fiction book about place, time and memory, and his mother’s small Belgian border town of Bouillon – Other People’s Countries – which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, won the Wales Book of the Year, and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
