Posted on 28 August 2019
University of Wales Press summer newsletter
What a busy season we have had at UWP with various conferences, book launches and several authors winning awards!
In April, we were awarded the BIC Product Data Excellence Award, which recognises UWP as among the very best across the industry for the quality of our data. This highlights the excellence achieved in our metadata entry for all of our titles. With good information, book buyers and librarians find it much easier to discover and order books – that makes their job quicker, resulting in more book sales and greater reach for our authors’ work.
We also celebrated the 100th birthday of Emyr Humphreys, one of Wales’s foremost novelists and author of over two dozen works of fiction, including works that are now set texts at A-Level, and is a past winner of the Somerset Maugham Award. He has also published highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. To celebrate his birthday, we attended the Emyr Humphreys Centenary Symposium at Swansea University, where we sold copies of his 2019 collection of poetry Shards of Light, and Emyr Humphreys by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, along with a number of other books that you can browse on our website.
Publication of Medieval Wales c.1050–1332: Centuries of Ambiguity by David Stephenson was another important event this season. It is the first title in our new Rethinking the History of Wales series, which aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the history of Wales by introducing particular periods and themes in ways that challenge established interpretations. In April, another series was launched with Luci Attala’s How Water Makes Us Human: Engagements with the Materiality of Water, the first title in the new Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology series engaging the world as an assemblage of interacting materials to reveal the constitutive and agential role of matter in the formation of material worlds.
May saw the publication of Jen Wilson’s Freedom Music: Wales, Emancipation and Jazz 1850–1950. This book traces the history of African American music in Wales from 1850, and Welsh women’s contribution. The following month, July, was also very busy with the publication of Speeches and Articles 2013–2017: His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, the third volume of edited works including a thematic expansion to the section on ‘Climate Change and Sustainability’ to accommodate a number of texts that address the interconnected relationship between economic, social and environmental sustainability. We also published the second title in our Horror Studies series, Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality, a collection of edited essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in the Horror genre, from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century.
UWP once again attended the International Medieval Conference in Leeds this year, where we showcased our popular medieval titles and launched three of our newest titles: the edited collection Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body, offering a direct approach to the material world that reminds us how we are the matter of our bodies; David Callander’s Dissonant Neighbours: Narrative Progress in early Welsh and English Poetry, which compares early Welsh and English poetry up to c.1250 and investigates why these two neighbouring literatures describe similar events in markedly different ways; and Monastic Life in the Medieval British Isles: Essays in Honour of Janet Burton, an edited collection of essays to celebrate the work and contribution of Professor Janet Burton to medieval monastic studies in Britain. Be sure to keep an eye on our twitter page to find out more about upcoming publications.
We are delighted to announce that two of our Gothic Literary Studies titles have been shortlisted for this year’s Allan Lloyd Smith Prizes: South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond by Rebecca Duncan, which has been shortlisted for the Monograph Prize category; and Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic edited by Robert McKay and John Miller, which has been shortlisted for the Association Edited Collections Prize category. We are also very pleased to have received two nominations for Wales Book of the Year 2019 – congratulations to Gethin Matthews, author of Having a Go at the Kaiser: A Welsh Family at War, and to Lisa Sheppard, author of Y Gymru ‘Ddu’ a’r Ddalen ‘Wen’: Aralledd ac Amlddiwylliannedd mewn Ffuglen Gymreig, er 1990, whose books were both shortlisted in the Creative Non-fiction category.
These are just a few of the season’s most exciting publications, which we hope you’ll add to your reading list.