Chinwag

The event will readings of both poetry and prose with performances by guest writers Rhian Edwards and Damian Walford Davies as well as Open Mic, led by local writer and performer Mike Smith.

If you have five minutes of material you would like to share or road-test with an audience, then bring you and your words along! If you’re reading make sure you arrive early and sign your name with Mike at around 7pm as Chinwag always proves to be a massively popular event.

Rhian is a multi-award winning poet and musician. Her first collection of poems Clueless Dogs (Seren) won Wales Book of the Year 2013, the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry 2013 and Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice 2013. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012. And her pamphlet of poems Parade the Fib, (Tall-Lighthouse), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008.

Poet, literary critic and editor Damian Walford Davies is Professor of English at Cardiff University, which he joined in 2013. He is the co-author of Whiteout (Parthian, 2006), and his first full collection, published by Seren – Suit of Lights – was a Wales Literature Exchange ‘Bookshelf’ choice for 2010. Alabaster Girls will appear from the same press in 2012. Damian’s fields of expertise include Romanticism, the interface between literature and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century poetry, and the two literatures of Wales. He has a particular interest in literary cartography, and in the ways in which poetry responds to works of art.

He is General Editor of The Oxford Literary History of Wales, and was one of the three judges of the 2008 Wales Book of the Year.

To book contact Aberystwyth Arts Centre on 01970 62 32 32 or www.aber.ac.uk/artscentre. For further information visit www.michaeldante.co.uk