Richard Gwyn

Poems for staying at home (Day 15)

Something set me off with Micaela Chirif’s poem on Day 12, which recalls a phone call from a dead friend, and I have decided to revisit an old favourite by poor, wasted Jorge Teillier – the only poet… Read More

Poems for staying at home (Day 2)

Today’s house poem, by the Chilean Jorge Teillier, concerns a boy looking out of the window of his parent’s home at a winter landscape. It is the melancholy lyricism of this poem that first attracted me; a mix… 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

Ways of Going Home

Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, Bonsai, won awards and brought the young Chilean poet international fame.  Bonsai is an elegantly-turned story which can be read in an hour, but is hardly, as some claimed on its publication, a classic… Read More