Max Boyce's Tribute to Dai Morris

We're about to launch the autobiography of the legendary Dai Morris - a man who worked shifts in a coal mine in the morning and played for his country in the afternoon. Imagine any of the current Wales squad doing that! Co-written with Martyn Williams he looks back at his playing days with Rhigos, Glynneath, Neath and Wales and gives his take on current state of rugby in Wales.The book will be launched at Rhigos Rugby Club on the 24th of October. Get your copy here

Any one remember Max Boyce's tribute to him?

Autobiography of addiction and reckless travel now available as ebook

In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live unless a suitable liver donor were found. A novelist and poet, he lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and alcoholism in the Mediterranean, principally Spain and Crete. Earlier this year this cathartic memoir won the category for Best Creative Non-fiction Book of the Year in the Welsh Book of the Year awards.

 The winner of the main prize, Patrick McGuinness has praised the book:

“A memoir of the nine years of drink, drugs and vagrancy that did for his first liver, it’s a jagged tale gracefully told. Full of humane surreality, there’s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together. Like many books about illness, it’s also about health: Gwyn is a citizen of both realms, describing life with ‘two passports’.”

The book is an account of his "lost" years; of addiction and reckless travel; serial hospitalizations; redemption via friendship, imagination, intellect, love and fatherhood; recovery; living with viral hepatitis, and the life-saving gift of a liver graft.

Richard Gwyn is a novelist, poet and critic. A brief incarnation as a beat poet in the late Seventies culminated in an appearance as a support act to The Cure. He also worked as an inadvertently fraudulent milkman and (legitimate) sawyer in London until an industrial accident led to voluntary exile from Thatcherism and nine years of vagrancy in the Mediterranean. His publications include The Colour of a Dog Running Away, published in the UK, USA and in many translations, and Deep Hanging Out, both novels; two academic titles on illness, the body, and communication, and several poetry titles, the most recent being Sad Giraffe Cafe. He is Director of the MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives in the city with his wife and two daughters.

The author’s first novel, The Colour of a Dog Running Away, won a Welsh Books Council Publishers Award, sold rights across the world and garnered warm and widespread review coverage including “The best novel of the year,” Scott Pack, The Bookseller; Commenting on how the more colourful aspects of his vagrancy fed both into his previous fiction and this his first memoir, Gwyn says,  

“I had a great deal of resistance to writing the book, until I tricked myself into thinking of the ‘I’ as a third person. By contrast, the two novels belong together, as a kind of diptych, and had a secret life long before I committed them to paper; they were probably easier to write than The Vagabond’s Breakfast. I don’t think I could ever have stuck at a 9-5 job. But I don’t feel nostalgic for or bound to the vagabond era of my life, and I don’t feel compelled to write only about those years, or about those kinds of people – drifters and exiles – particularly now, having finished the memoir. So perhaps it was a kind of exorcism. Aren’t we constantly in a process of clearing out and then re-stocking our creative and emotional lives; isn’t it a process of continual renewal? It is important to know that what one is attempting to write is in some way a step into the unknown, a way of stating a particular truth in a new way.” 

Get ePub version here

Buy Kindle edition here

Richard Gwyn is available for interviews, festival appearances and to write pieces. He has performed as a novelist and poet at events and workshops across the world.