Lucie McKnight Hardy reading Badgerface

Tracey Rhys

Jane Fraser

Patrick Jones

Richard Gwyn

John Freeman

Kate Hamer

All photos by Michou Burckett St. Laurent

The Lonely Crowd in Cardiff were…

Jane Fraser lives and works in Llangennith, Gower. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Manchester Fiction Prize, and in 2018, placed 2nd in the Fish Memoir Prize and selected as one of the Hay Writers at Work. She is delighted that Salt is to publish her first collection of short fiction, The South Westerlies, in early 2019.

John Freeman is a prize-winning poet and critic whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies over several decades. His most recent books are What Possessed Me, and Strata Smith and the Anthropocene, both published in 2016. Earlier collections include A Suite for Summer, White Wings: New and Selected Prose Poems, Landscape with Portraits and The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems. What Possessed Me won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award as part of the Wales Book of the Year Awards 2017.

Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. Following several years in London, he spent the 1980s travelling, much of it recorded in his memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, which won a Wales Book of the Year award in 2012. He is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent being Stowaway (2018), and three novels, The Colour of a Dog Running Away (2005), Deep Hanging Out (2007) and The Blue Tent (due 2019). Both his prose and poetry have been widely translated. His work as a translator from Spanish includes The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (2016) and a forthcoming selection from Colombian poet Darío Jaramillo. He teaches Creative Writing at Cardiff University.

Kate Hamer‘s debut novel The Girl in the Red Coat, was published in 2015. It was shortlisted for The Costa First Novel Prize, the British Book Industry Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, The John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger and the Wales Book of the Year. It was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into 18 different languages. Her second novel The Doll Funeral was published in February 2017 and was chosen as an editor’s pick on Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’ and Book of the Month in the industry journal The Bookseller. Her third novel Crushed will be published by Faber & Faber in May 2019. Kate lives with her husband in Cardiff.

Patrick Jones’ published work includes The Guerilla Tapestry (1995), The Protest Of Discipline (1996), Detritus (1997), Mute Communion (1997), Commemoration and Amnesia (1999), Fuse (2001), Against (2003), Darkness is where the stars are (2008), Tongues for a Stammering Time (2009), The Aspirations of Poverty (2017).

Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales, and is a Welsh speaker. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, will be published by Dead Ink Books in 2019. She has an MA in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, and has worked in the advertising, marketing and public relations industries. She lives in Herefordshire with her husband and three children.

Tracey Rhys is from Bridgend. A Literature Wales Bursary recipient with an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University, her first pamphlet of poems, Teaching a Bird to Sing was a recommended by The TLS in its round-up of Michael Marks Award submissions for 2017. She has been published in journals including Planet and works closely with Cardiff theatre company, Winterlight, a subsidiary of Company of Sirens. She was recently a writer in the Literature Wales/Cadw project, Weird and Wonderful Wales, in collaboration with the artist Pete Fowler.

About the Editor

 John Lavin has a doctorate from the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, as well as an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. The former Fiction Editor of Wales Arts Review, he edited their short story anthology, A Fiction Map of Wales (2014), as well as their 2015 -16 online short fiction series, Story: Retold. Lavin also co-founded The Lampeter Review, co-editing the magazine for several years. His criticism has appeared in The Irish Times, Wales Arts Review, The Cardiff Review and The Welsh Agenda.