‘A enir cenedl ar unwaith?’
News from Rob Mimpriss
6th May 2023: 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.
My introductions to both these books revisit their themes in the light of Brexit, the rise of English nationalism and the threat of fascism, in a century of extinctions both biological and cultural. They also offer – in place of the spectacle of the coronation, the vast expense, and the arrests of peaceful protesters – an insight into the origins and nature of the British union. Both books are discounted to less than £9, and will remain so until the end of Friday 12th May.
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Books by Rob Mimpriss
Pugnacious Little Trolls
‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru
Prayer at the End: Twenty-Three Stories
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine
For His Warriors: Thirty Stories
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com
Reasoning: Twenty Stories
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review
The Sleeping Bard: Three Nightmare Visions of the World, of Death, and of Hell
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.
A Book of Three Birds
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin
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
Hallowe’en in the Cwm: The Stories of Owen Wynne Jones
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price
Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys