Award-winning Creative Writing professor to read at Hay Festival Winter Weekend

Christopher Meredith, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at USW, will read from his latest novels at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, on Sunday 28 November.

Prof Meredith, who has been publishing poetry collections and works of fiction since his first print publication in 1984, published two new books simultaneously earlier this year – the novel Please and poetry collection Still.

As part of the forthcoming Hay Festival Winter Weekend, which takes place from 25 – 28 November, he will discuss both books and writing in parallel forms with fellow Welsh author Jon Gower. This is the first time since the beginning of the pandemic that Hay Festival have hosted in-person events in the famous town, although all of their events will also be streamed online.

Prof Meredith is the award-winning author of five novels, a book of short stories, five collections of poetry and he also translates Welsh to English. His prizes include an Eric Gregory Award, the Arts Council of Wales Young Writer Prize, both for poetry, and the Fiction Prize for his first novel, Shifts, which was also shortlisted for the title of Greatest Welsh Novel of All Time.

Both Please and Still have been reviewed to wide acclaim since publication. Still, hailed by The Yorkshire Times as ‘a major achievement’, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction.

Meanwhile Please, called ‘a virtuoso performance’ by the Western Mail, is a verbally dazzling tragicomedy about hidden passion and regret in which octogenarian language geek Vernon, who has never written a book before, tries to find a way to write the story of his long marriage.

Tickets for the event, which is at 2.30pm on Sunday 28 November, are available on the Hay Festival website. Please and Still are available to buy from Seren Books.