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.”
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.
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