News from Rob Mimpriss


2024/03/18: Turns of the River, Turns of the Road

A parcel arrived yesterday containing reviewers’ copies of the latest titles from my publishing imprint, Cockatrice Books. The first is Gwyriad: Poems by Nigel Jarrett, sharp and striking in its poetic technique, reflecting on class, industrial heritage, and industrial decline, family and local history, and the history of the former Pen-y-Fal Psychiatric Hospital. The second is River of Hope by Roger Granelli, a novel...

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2024/03/06: Land of Change: Stories of Struggle and Solidarity from Wales

A parcel containing two books reached me from Culture Matters the other day: the first, a copy of Land of Change, an anthology of Welsh writing edited by Gemma June Howell, and containing a short story of mine, ‘Industry in the Country of the Blind,’ among its eighty-odd entries...

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2023/05/06: Reading for Republicans

As a response to the junketing taking place in the centre of London this weekend, Cockatrice Books quietly discounts two of its titles to rather less than the cost of the coronation for the average UK taxpayer. My translation of A Book of Three Birds by Morgan Llwyd, written by a roundhead and Fifth Monarchist during the early years of Cromwell’s dictatorship; and T. Gwynn Jones’s translation of The Sleeping Bard by Ellis Wynne, published just a few years before Scotland’s annexation by England, both reflect on the nature of power and authority, the relationship between religion and the state, the purpose of the British union, and the future of Wales...

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2022/12/13: Pugnacious Little Trolls at the White Review

There are not many extrinsic rewards for Welsh writers. The reading population is small; there are significant financial hardships; we are saturated with material from England and the wider Anglosphere; and even the best of Welsh writing is perceived, with some reason, as unvaried and unexciting. Publishers regard Welsh writers at best with a kind of commercial suspicion, and at worst with political and cultural mistrust.

Even so, my recent short-story collection, Pugnacious Little Trolls, has just been listed as one of The White Review’s books of the year for 2023...

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2022/06/18: Rivers of Wales by Jim Perrin

Jim Perrin’s Rivers of Wales, recently published by Carreg Gwalch, joins his earlier books, Snowdon and The Mountains of Wales in combining autobiography with reflections on Welsh heritage and landscape. Among the pleasures it offers the reader are the wealth of his descriptions of writers, naturalists, scholars and adventurers...

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2022/05/21: ‘Industry in the Country of the Blind’ goes to Culture Matters

In a short story, ‘The Country of the Blind’ by H G Wells, a climber in the Andes separated from his party stumbles upon a highland valley cultivated by a forgotten community of the congenitally blind. These people, cut off in their isolated valley over centuries, have created a way of life so perfectly adapted to their blindness that they have forgotten that sight exists...

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2022/02/19: Pugnacious Little Trolls goes to Nation Cymru

Almost a year after its publication, Pugnacious Little Trolls is reviewed by one of the kingmakers of Welsh writing, Jon Gower, for Nation Cymru....

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2022/02/07: A British Triad?

Among the pleasures of reading Welsh literature is Ellis Wynne’s eighteenth-century prose classic, Y Bardd Cwsc (The Sleeping Bard). Written under the influence of Bunyan’s, Dante’s and Milton’s religious epics, and more especially of Francisco de Quevedo’s satirical visions, the book’s three visions of the world, death and hell express a distinctively Welsh perspective on the rise of capitalism and the British state...

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2021/03/24: Close Ties – New Fiction by Rob Mimpriss and A L Reynolds

February 2021 saw the launch of my fourth short-story collection, Pugnacious Little Trolls, alongside Of the Ninth Verse, a novel by A. L. Reynolds. The virtual launch was attended by a small crowd of sixty people, supported by short-story writers Nigel Jarrett and John O’Donoghue, and by the poet Angela Topping...

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2019/08/01: Reasoning: Twenty Stories

The contact form on my website does not produce much traffic, and what traffic it produces normally falls foul of my email account’s spam rules. But a little while ago, a stranger sent me the message which I quote in part below...

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2016/11/04: Dangerous Asylums at The Carriageworks in Denbigh

4th November 2016: Tea and cake, two songs by Elaine Walker,readings by the contributors, and a supportive and deeply appreciative audience marked a celebration of Dangerous Asylums, an anthology of stories from Denbigh Mental Hospital...

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2016/10/10: Dangerous Asylums at Bangor University

Poster advertising the launch of Dangerous Asylums on World Mental Health Day, 10th October 2016, at Bangor University

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2015/11/20: The Short Story – Compression and Resonance

The Short Story - Compression and Resonance

Led by Rob Mimpriss

Friday November 20th, 1-3pm Ucheldre Literary Society, Ucheldre Arts Centre, Holyhead.

The short story has a rather unusual niche in world literature. Its position seems equidistant between the novel and the poem, emphasising resonance, compression and shapeliness of form, and some critics see it as intentionally marginal, exploring the significance, even the cosmic and spiritual significance, of obscure and impoverished lives...

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Books by Rob Mimpriss

Dangerous Asylums

‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’

Philip Gross