The Wales Book of the Year Award 2012 Short List
“Wales Book of the Year should be about passion, ambition and talent,
and the short-listed authors have it in bucket-loads.” (Spencer Jordan)
On Thursday 10 May at a star-studded event at Theatr Brycheiniog in Brecon, Literature Wales announced the nine English and nine Welsh-language titles which have reached the Wales Book of the Year Award 2012 Short List.
Creative Non-Fiction
The three titles in the Creative Non-Fiction category are Ghost Milk (Hamish Hamilton) by Iain Sinclair, a work which explores the grandest of Grand Projects – the giant myth that is 2012’s London Olympics as the author deems it, and a statement on the throwaway impermanence of the present; The Vagabond’s Breakfast (Alcemi) by Richard Gwyn, a memoir which is an account of his “lost” years; of addiction and reckless travel; love and fatherhood; recovery; living with viral hepatitis, and the life-saving gift of a liver graft. Last, but not least, is Byron Rogers’ Three Journeys (Gomer), a part reminiscence, part gazetteer, part portrait gallery, and turns on Byron Rogers’s experiences of growing up in, and leaving, Wales.
Website: http://walesbookoftheyear.co.uk/
Link to the Creative Non-Fiction page: http://walesbookoftheyear.co.uk/this-year/#creative
Notes on Ghost Milk
It is a story of incidents and accidents, of the curious meeting the bizarre. He writes of being a labourer in Stratford, of Orwellian steps to ban a book launch in a library, of the fundamentalist visions of J.G.Ballard. Stories of police raids, countercultural manifestations, and mass expulsions jostle with accounts of the aftermath of failed grand projects: the Millennium Dome, Thames Gateway, and numerous other half-completed, ill-advised or abandoned structures.
Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects – the giant myth that is 2012’s London Olympics – Ghost Milk (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin) finds a landscape under sentence of death. It is a road map to a possible future as well as Iain Sinclair’s most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present.
Thursday 12 July 2012
Awards Ceremony at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff
To buy tickets contact Literature Wales: 029 2047 2266 / post@literaturewales.org