Francesca rhydderch biography
- Biography.
- Francesca Rhydderch is a Welsh novelist and academic.
- Francesca Rhydderch: Information about the author and a full list of their books.
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Francesca Rhydderch
reviews
The Queen of Romance: Marguerite Jervis (A Biography)
by Liz Jones and
Cyfrinachau by Eluned Phillips, edited with an introduction by Menna Elfyn
Honno, £12.99
With the publication of these titles, Honno Press draws attention to two fascinating and underrated writers of the last century. Firstly, Liz Jones offers a humane and sympathetic account of the output of Marguerite Jervis, bringing to light an astonishing number of popular romances published during what was a long and eventful life. The second book under review is quite a different enterprise, consisting of two works by Welsh-language author Eluned Phillips, published in the Honno Classics series and edited with an introduction by Menna Elfyn: a novel, Cyfrinachau (âSecretsâ) followed by the poem on âLa Môme Piafâ, which came second at the National Eisteddfod in Bala in 1967 (another poem by Phillips came first). The contrast between the two writers emerges immediately, with the extravagant excess of larger-than-life Jervis on the one hand, and the quieter, more consi
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Author's Notes: Francesca Rhydderch
Three years ago I paid a visit to a secondary school on Hong Kong Island: St Stephen’s College, in the village of Stanley. Although I had never been there before, it seemed oddly familiar from all the books and photographs I had pored over while I was writing my novel The Rice Paper Diaries.
In December 1941 this school became a bloody battlefield until the British surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day. Hordes of captured civilians were brought from Victoria on the other side of Hong Kong Island to this inhospitable, mosquito-infested square of land.
Terrified Chinese labourers were deployed to put up a barbed-wire fence. The apartments and teaching blocks had been wrecked internally during the fighting, leaving no proper sanitation or drinking water. The place was strewn with decomposing bodies.
Among the crowd of prisoners herded into the makeshift compound that day were my great-aunt Menna Jones and her husband Captain Cosmo Jones, who had been working for the Chinese Maritime Customs when Hong Kong fell. They had hardly any luggag
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The Library of Wales is a classics series celebrating the literary culture of Wales in the English Language primarily in the 20th century. It was launched in 2006 with five titles, So Long Hector Bebb, Border Country, Country Dance, The Dark Philosophers & Cwmardy. It has now fifty titles in the series with close to 100,000 books sold and can claim to have changed the perception of Welsh writing in English, reinvigorating the interest in classics such as Autobiography of a Super Tramp and Rhapsody, while bringing new light to titles that fallen from view such as Frank Richards’ memoir of army life in Old Soldiers Never Die and Leonora Brito’s Dat’s Love and other stories. Many of the titles are now being taught at university level while Poetry 1900 to 2000, an anthology edited by Meic Stephens has been added to the GCSE syllabus in Wales. The series has also inspired radio dramas, stage plays, art exhibitions and much political and cultural commentary. The Library of Wales 1 to 50 series was edited by Professor Dai Smith and published by Parthian.
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