Richard Gwyn

Poems for staying at home (Day 22)

  What is insignificance? The routines of the quotidinal? Can one, nevertheless, become an artist of the quotidinal? And if making tea, is it not a point of some importance to use the correct tea, in its allocated… Read More

Poems for staying at home (Day 17)

  A second poem from Laura Wittner of Argentina to accompany the one I posted on Day 6 (which was in fact Day 36 of the UK lockdown), just because it felt appropriate, as we spend time watching… Read More

Notes from a Catalan village: how to greet a stranger

Yesterday morning, returning from a walk with Bruno in bright spring sunshine, I enter the small car park adjacent to the village cemetery. An old and weathered-looking fellow, somewhat twisted in appearance, is limping towards his car, parked… Read More

Patagonian People

Driving with Hans Schulz towards the Alerces National Park on Monday, we passed this gaucho, who allowed us to take his photo. He was accompanied by four large dogs, who sniffed me respectfully but, like the horse, knew… Read More

Crossing Patagonia

Writers Chain tour of Argentina & Chile, continued: After three days of readings, lectures and tea parties in Puerto Madryn, Gaiman and Trelew, yesterday we made the long trip across the Patagonian meseta to Trevelin, in the foothills… Read More

Forgetting Chatwin

Day five of the Wales Writers Chain tour of Argentina and Chile. We began in Buenos Aires on Monday, at the Spanish Cultural Centre, where Mererid Hopwood and I gave lectures on, respectively, the Welsh and English literary… Read More

The ‘very special place of love’: Roberto Bolaño, V.S. Naipaul, and sodomy.

  A new addition to the mass of Bolaño miscellanea being published in English appears on the New York Review of Books blog. In an entertaining essay, Scholars of Sodom, Bolaño takes a delightful swipe at V.S. Naipaul’s… Read More