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Award-winning Welsh writer Robert Minhinnick will visit Malta in October to take part in an international project run by Literature Across Frontiers and Inizjamed in collaboration with the British Council. As part of his Residency in Valletta, Mr. Minhinnick will be reading at an International Literary Festival organised by Inizjamed.
Port cities have always played a crucial role in the cultural development of regions and countries. Gateways to the wider world and centres of trade and industry, they have attracted people from different backgrounds and facilitated the exchange of not only goods but also of ideas. The Sealines Project will link 6 European port cities with a tradition of literary bilingualism through a series of writers’ residencies to create a literary multimedia portrait of each city. The cities involved will be four capitals: Cardiff, Helsinki, Riga and Valletta, and two regional ports: Galway on the West Coast of Ireland and Koper (Capodistria) on the Slovenian coast.
The visiting authors will be given an opportunity to become acquainted with the local literary scene, as well as to explore a particular aspect of the city’s cultural, marine and economic history, for example through a residency co-sponsored by the port authority, a museum, or a major industry through which they will be able to find out about the port’s past and be in contact with its contemporary life.
Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952 in Neath, South Wales. He grew up near Bridgend and studied at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cardiff, then after working in an environmental field, co-founded Friends of the Earth (Cymru) and became the organisation’s joint co-ordinator for some years. He is advisor to the charity, 'Sustainable Wales' and edits the international quarterly, Poetry Wales.
As well as being an active environmental campaigner, he is an essayist and poet, having published two collections of essays: Watching the Fire Eater (1992), winner of the 1993 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award; and Badlands (1996), essays about post-communist Albania, California and the state of Wales and England. He has also edited Green Agenda: Essays on the environment of Wales (1994). His book, To Babel and Back, was published in 2005 and won the 2006 Wales Book of the Year Award.
His poetry collections include A Thread in the Maze (1978); Native Ground (1979); Life Sentences (1983); The Dinosaur Park (1985); The Looters (1989); and Hey Fatman (1994). A Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 1999, followed by After the Hurricane (2002). In 2003, the same publisher issued his translations from the Welsh, The Adulterer's Tongue: An Anthology of Welsh Poetry in Translation.
www.contemporarywriters.com
www.inizjamed.org
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