Eluned Phillips was a passionate woman who ignited equally passionate responses in others. The second woman ever to wear the National Eisteddfod crown – Wales' most prestigious Welsh language literary prize – she is the only woman to have won it twice. Unfortunately, her writing life was blemished by rumours over her work's authorship.Unusual among Welsh women of her generation, Eluned embraced an unconventional lifestyle which took her to pre-war London and Paris, where she met art...

Bondo is Menna Elfyn's fifth poetry book from Bloodaxe. The title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing solidarity with a nation’s wound. Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer.Like her previous Bloodaxe titl...

Menna Elfyn's dual language Welsh-English collection Murmur is full of murmurings, such as the need ‘to walk the earth as if there’s a baby sleeping next door’. Murmur is a poetry of meditation, from the reverberations of dead poets to murmurs of the heart which force the poet to dwell on the irregular beat of the poet’s lot.Distant sounds too are heard from captivity in a sequence of poems about the last princess of Wales, Catrin Glyndwr, daughter of Owain Glyndw...

From warrior queens to King Arthur, this epic collection explores the tribes, rulers and civilisations of Britain's Iron AgeIn the first millennium BC, the Iron Age arrived in Britain, bringing with it huge technological and social changes. New civilisations arose, the landscape was transformed, and societies developed new cultures and lifestyles.In this comprehensive collection, we take an in-depth look at Iron Age Britain and its inhabitants. The Essa...

This experimental volume of literary criticism offers various interpretations of the work of the poet Menna Elfyn, and gives an outline of our relationship with literature and our reading habits. It is an attempt to provide a fresh interpretation of the work by experimenting for the first time in Welsh with the epistolary method of criticism, through a series of fictional letters. This is also the first extended study of Menna Elfyn's poetry: addressed to the poet's work in particular, but...