Category Archives: Portfolio

Profile in The Irish Examiner of ‘A City Burning’

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A very positive verdict in The Irish Examiner from  Sue Leonard

Short, sharp and sometimes shocking, these wonderful stories truly pack a punch.

Sue’s long-running weekly profile Beginner’s Pluck offers a snapshot of a new writer and their debut work.

There’s a strong theme of witness in these 26 stories, which are set in Wales, Northern Ireland, and Italy. The characters face different challenges, from a failed marriage to eulogising a hated terrorist, but each of them is at a moment of change, needing to reassess their beliefs, or image of themselves. 

In an enjoyable interview with Sue she asked what I would be ‘in another life’. To my own surprise I said I would like to be an expert ballroom dancer. That will surprise those who know me but it’s true! I don’t watch Strictly but, yes, sweeping rhythmically around a floor is the life I haven’t had… yet.

Review of ‘A City Burning’ by Prof Diana Wallace

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Prof Diana Wallace researches women’s writing, with special interests in historical fiction; Welsh writing in English and Modernism and the Gothic.  She is co-director of the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales and Leader of the English Research Unit at the University of South Wales. Her review appears on the website of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culutre in Small Nations at the University of South Wales.

Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations

How can writers respond to sudden, even exponential, change? It can take a decade, as it did after the first world war or 9/11, for novels and memoirs to catch up as writers process traumatic events. And readers, time-pressed and battered by 24-hour news, may turn to genre fiction for the comfort of familiar plot lines and predictable endings.  The short story, on the other hand, can turn on a sixpence to give us a snapshot of our crises in real time. Compressed, intense, often challenging, some of the most powerful examples of the form have come from writers on the so-called margins: women, immigrants, people from ‘small nations’ such as Wales and Ireland.

Angela Graham’s assured and compelling debut collection, A City Burning, ranges across Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy. It offers 26 brief stories, most no more than a few pages (one a mere page and a quarter), which turn their forensic flashlight on a moment of change when a character has to make a choice. Continue reading Review of ‘A City Burning’ by Prof Diana Wallace →

On ‘Your Place And Mine’, BBC Radio Ulster

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It was lovely to have this [click here to listen Interview with Anne Marie McAleese ] on Your Place And Mine BBC Radio Ulster 7th November. This long-running and much-lauded series focuses on place. We talked about the role of place in my short story collection A City Burning.

I read an extract from the story Coasteering in which a middle-aged woman and her Ulster Scots-speaking coasteering instructor venture far out along the coast at twilight:

‘Dinnae ower-think it!’ Alec urged, and then repeated himself….

I loosened the cuffs of the waterproof jacket that added a layer to the battered old wetsuit he’d provided. Seawater gushed out past my wrists. I poised myself, leapt − an un-timeable gap − and was smothered in crashing bubbles and noise and resistance, then broke upwards into air and the push and pull of the sea. This was what I’d wanted, to be out beyond the little beaches and rock-strewn shores; to be out of my depth but safe; to be gripped by the sea’s power but not at its mercy. I respect the sea. I fear it…. Continue reading On ‘Your Place And Mine’, BBC Radio Ulster →

Interview with Seren Books on ‘A City Burning’

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As her debut short story collection A City Burning, is published, we interview Angela Graham to find out more about the book and what inspires her.

In the twenty-six stories in A City Burning, set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, children and adults face, in the flames of personal tragedy, moments of potential transformation. On the threshold of their futures each must make a choice: how to live in this new ‘now’. With a virtuoso control of tone, by turns elegiac, comic, lyrical, philosophical, A City Burning examines power of all types. The result is a deeply human book full of hauntingly memorable characters and narratives.

What is the meaning behind the title A City Burning?

In the opening story, ‘The Road’, a young girl witnesses her city blazing. She understands that this is a sign of the collapse of the status quo, of all the usual certainties. She is confronted with the need to react to this new situation. What values should guide her in this choice? I realised that this story encapsulates the theme of many stories in the collection – witnessing major change and having to work out a response. It seemed a fitting title for the book.

Belfast on a November evening

Continue reading Interview with Seren Books on ‘A City Burning’ →

A City Burning: Angela Graham talks about that title

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video shot and edited by John Geraint

A City Burning from Seren Books

26 short stories set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, from the end of the econd World War to the Covid pandemic.

With a virtuoso control of tone, by turns elegiac, comic, lyrical, philosophical, A City Burning examines power of all types, exploring conflicts between political allegiances; between autonomy and intimacy; emotional display and concealment; resistance versus acceptance. The result is a deeply human book full of hauntingly memorable characters and narratives.

These stories are not comfortable… but they are honest, searing, insightful and very, very good.” – Inez Lynn Continue reading A City Burning: Angela Graham talks about that title →

2 Poems in Deep Time Volume 2

Poetry, Portfolio, PortfolioPrint, Print

Matthew M.C. Smith is an adventurous, and apparently indefatigable, poet and poetry impresario. It may be his gift for collaboration which enables him to be so productive.

It’s so lovely to see my poem ‘Thaw’ here:  Deep Time Volume 2

This beautiful-to-handle, easy-on-the-eye, large-format book from Black Bough Poetry has been produced by a team and assembling a coherent team is a skill in itself. The members are:

” Welsh writer, Laura Wainwright, Louisiana’s former Laureate, Jack Bedell, and Aotearoa’s, Ankh Spice. The amazing illustrations are by Rebecca Wainwright, a Newport-born artist from Newport in Wales, now living in London. Music for this project is composed and curated by Brisbane-based Stuart Rawlinson.”

Artwork by Rebecca Wainwright

Deep Time volume 2, is Black Bough poetry’s second print anthology. It is dedicated to the writer Robert Macfarlane, who wrote award-winning non-fiction work, Underland (2019).

Continue reading 2 Poems in Deep Time Volume 2 →

Poem published: THERE AND HERE

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THERE AND HERE

in a dream, the mirror of the Trinity

 

Our mirror holds your image in its square

and we have made the frame, a hand-breadth wide.

From the mid-point of the base springs a pair

of vibrant, scrolling fronds, one either side;

carved in relief, acanthus-leafed, baroque,

flexing like seaweed in a rising tide

they cross the top as though to interlock

but stop just short – potential growth implied.

The wood is light, clean-edged, northern and spare,

fit for an airy room with snow outside;

a place for thinking clearly in; somewhere

to find a balance, ponder, or decide.

 

Look. See your true self here, the self we share;

your I, You, Us.  Be its reflection there.

 

New City magazine, November 2020

 

A City Burning – reactions

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A city burns in a crisis − because the status quo has collapsed and change must come. Every value, relationship and belief is shaken and the future is uncertain.

A CITY BURNING  Order here

A Book of the Year 2020 on Nation Cymru and The Lonely Crowd.

Books of the Year 2020: Part One

“This is an exemplary collection illustrating the creative possibilities of the short fiction form” – Jane Fraser

“Angela Graham is a brilliant new voice. This is literature that deserves to last.” – Kate Hamer

“Angela Graham’s debut collection A City Burning announced a confident, stylish new voice in short fiction.” Jon Gower (Nation Cymru)

“In this powerful collection, Angela Graham shows herself master of the angle of vision: her tales capture the mercurial moment when a person’s world is changed forever, in a road or room, against a landscape, seascape or starscape, at the graveside or (as in the towering story, ‘Life-Task’) at a forsaken railway station in the aftermath of war.” – Stevie Davies

Continue reading A City Burning – reactions →

SIAP Award from Arts Council N Ireland 2020/21

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The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has given me a Support for the Individual Artist Award towards the drafting of a collection of poetry on the theme of SANCTUARY.

I am honoured to receive this funding and greatly appreciate the encouragement.

A Garw Valley cairn by Phil Cope

This collection  will not be written by me alone. The funding enables me both to involve four other poets who will each contribute a poem, written in collaboration with me, and also to benefit from mentoring by Glen Wilson, author of the poetry collection An Experience on the Tongue (Doire Press) and winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2017.

Glen Wilson

Continue reading SIAP Award from Arts Council N Ireland 2020/21 →