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Do you want to hear about the Devil's visit to the glove maker, the woman betting on underdogs at the dog track, a desperate mother performing a nightly striptease, and the young Korean immigrant telling her secrets to the sway of the sea........................
Then come along to John Smith’s Bookshop, Swansea University (Singleton Campus) on Monday 23 November from 12.30pm when award winning Swansea University creative writing graduate Rebecca F. John will be launching and signing her ‘Clown's Shoes’ dark and dazzling debut collection of short stories.
Rebecca will be reading from the collection and taking part in a Q&A with Swansea University’s Head of Creative Writing, Professor David Britton. The launch is free and refreshments will be provided.
Stories from the collection have been shortlisted for the EFG Sunday Times Short Story award and recently won the PEN International New Voices award.
Rebecca John is from Pwll, a village on the South Wales coast. She studied Creative Writing at Swansea University. She has been published in Parthian's Nu: Fiction & Stuff, and the Terry Hetherington Award anthologies Cheval 4 and 5. Her short story, ‘The Dog Track’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013, and she was highly commended in the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize.
Reviews for Clown's Shoes:
'John favours a searchlight on the lonely and forsaken. We peer into worlds containing lives so brittle you should be afraid to touch in case they snap or wither. There is a timeless, sensual quality to John’s prose and a creeping seam of unease underpinning these sketched lives. ‘The Dog Track’ snaps and springs to life, the eerie twilight worlds of striptease and Jazz clubs emerge through tender prose that renders images so vivid they strike and keep on striking in the darkness that follows.’
'This is an outstanding collection of short stories by a new author whose sparkling prose is a pleasure to read. [...] The short story is not an easy genre. Really intriguing short stories, which continue to reverberate in the reader's mind long after they are read, are rare. But this collection manages to do that flawlessly. A triumph for this relatively young author, and I can't wait to see what she does next. Highly recommended.'
Clown’s Shoes is published by independent publishing company Parthian Books.
Based in Cardigan/Aberteifi on the west coast of Wales, Parthian the company was established in 1993 by Publishing Director Richard Lewis Davies to publish his first novel, Work, Sex and Rugby. Since then, Parthian has risen to become one of
the most respected publishers in Wales and internationally. Their list incorporates a range of new fiction, poetry and drama, from writers as varied as Deborah Kay Davies, Dai Smith, Rachel Trezise, Glen Peters, John Harrison, Stevie Davies, Cynan Jones, Tyler Keevil and Niall Griffiths.
Enquiries: Claire Houguez, Editor and Marketing Officer, Parthian Books (c.houguez@gmail.com)
To find out more about the Creative Writing programme at Swansea University go to http://www.swansea.ac.uk/english/creativewriting
- Tuesday 17 November 2015 13.04 GMT
- Thursday 12 September 2019 13.55 BST
- Swansea University, Tel: 01792 295050