Broken Sleep Books Showcase
We're excited to be collaborating with Dyddiau Du on this event!
We will have Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, James Byrne, Taylor Edmonds and Matthew Haigh talking about their books with a Q+A and book signing after. Hosted by Joshua Jones. Information about the books below.
Friday 1st November 2024
Doors at 19:00. Event starts at 19:15
Book Space Cardiff, 26a Crwys Road, CF24 4NL
To get your ticket and to order copies of the books fill in the form below.
You will receive an email with details on how to pay shortly. My working hours are between 10-6 Monday to Saturday and I will endeavour to get the emails out within one working day of you signing up.
There will be a limited number of copies of each book available on the day. If you would like to guarantee a copy of any of them, I would recommend that you preorder them.
Despegue / Departure - Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning despegue / departure is a book about poetry, place, and belonging. Its rich, challenging, and subversive sonnets reveal the complexities and possibilities of Cuban contemporary poetry to a new English-language audience. Rodríguez Núñez speaks to a global generation of exiles and those whose hearts remain forever elsewhere, those who have found another home. despegue / departure is an original, inventive and unflinching examination of what it means to leave, to be left behind, and of our ability to stay.
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, essayist, translator, and professor. He is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with one hundred collections of poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards in the Spanish-speaking region, including the coveted Loewe Prize. His selected poems has been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese and he has read his poetry in over fifty countries. During the eighties he was the editor of the influential Cuban cultural journal,El Caimán Barbudo, where he published numerous articles on poetry and film. He has brought out a book of interviews with some of the most renowned poets in the Spanish language and has compiled three anthologies of poetry from his generation in Cuba. He has translated both from English into Spanish and from Spanish into English.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and an essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated over thirty books of some of the most respected voices from the region into English. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award in the US. She is a recipient of the University of Wisconsin’s inaugural Poetry in Translation Prize, two NEA Translation Grants, and a PEN Translates Award. She is the co-editor, with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding, of the groundbreaking transatlantic translation anthology,Poetry’s Geographies(Eulalia / Shearsman 2022). She is an editor for the transnational and translational press, Action Books.
They divide their time between Gambier, Ohio, where they are Professors of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.
The Overmind - James Byrne
Traversing an axis of Liverpool-London, and following a car accident in New York, The Overmind is an attempt to metabolise experience whilst seeing the world through the skin of a jellyfish. In lyric poems and sequences, Byrne summons his Irish and English working-class ancestry, asking questions against injustice to those in power. These poems are written through grief, illness and silence, where the author’s love for his daughter during periods of separation is powerfully connected with his own father’s dementia. Mythogeographic, linguistically adept and restlessly explorative of social and personal space, The Overmind is Byrne’s seventh full collection of poems and his most powerful work to date.
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collection is The Overmind (2024, Broken Sleep Books). Others include Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) and Of Breaking Glass (BSB, 2022). A Selected Poems, Nightsongs for Gaia, is due in 2025. Byrne was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017). His co-translation with the author Ro Mehrooz of Rohingya poems, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, was published by Arc in October 2024.
Back Teeth - Taylor Edmonds
Back Teeth is the debut pamphlet from the phenomenal Taylor Edmonds, examining girlhood, the feminine body, and the dark place within that snarls and roars with veined gums. Edmonds uses these startling poems as vehicles for identity, nature, and womanhood, unearthing an enchanting and frightening landscape. Edmonds’ bold, fierce poems give way to discovery through her sharp, vivid imagination .This is poetry that questions and challenges the world around it, pushing the limits of the known and creating new ground on which to walk.
Taylor Edmonds is a poet, writer and creative facilitator from Barry. Her work explores themes of womanhood, identity, connection, nature and empowerment. Taylor’s debut poetry pamphlet Back Teeth is out now with Broken Sleep Books. She was the 21-22 Poet in Residence for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. She has received a Rising Stars Award from Literature Wales and Firefly Press for her writing for young people. Taylor is currently working on her debut YA fiction novel.
