Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
Writing on Water
Writing on Water
Couldn't load pickup availability
Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Cyfrol o straeon byrion gan Maggie Harris a ysbrydolwyd gan leisiau o'r Caribî, man geni'r awdures, ac o Brydain lle y bu'n byw fel oedolyn. Straeon am ymfudiad a goroesi ac am blant a theuluoedd a dynnir ynghyd ac a rwygir ar wahân ydynt.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Maggie Harris' short-story collection Writing on Water is informed by voices of the Caribbean where she was born and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. These are stories of migration and survival, of children and families brought together or torn apart.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781723708
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781723708
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- Writing on Water
- Awdur / Author
- Harris, Maggie
- Current Price ex VAT
- £8.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £8.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2017-02-16
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 128 pages
- Size
- 129 × 198 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Nofelau a Storïau ar Gyfer Oedolion (yn Saesneg) | EN: Adult Fiction and Stories (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Straeon Byrion (yn Saesneg) | EN: Short Stories (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Maggie Harris is originally from Guyana and lived in Kent until 2006 when she moved to Wales. She performs her work frequently at various venues. A poet, prose writer and memoirist, she won the Guyana Prize for Literature for her first collection, Limbolands , 2000, and was Regional Winner of The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, 2014. Her latest collection of poetry is Sixty Years of Loving , (Cane Arrow Press), and short stories, In Margate by Lunchtime , (Cultured Llama Press).
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
Writing on Water is a collection of short stories inundated with water and the ebb and flow of human life. Maggie Harris draws on her experiences of the Caribbean, growing up in Guyana, and her times in England and Wales. But these are more than autobiographical tales. The first story, ‘Sending for Chantal’, is one of almost unbearable pathos, written from the point of view of a girl growing up in the Caribbean, whose mother has left to work in America. The mother hopes to earn enough in the great land of opportunity to be able to send for her daughter Chantal. But the months and years pass and Chantal grows up without her mother – with only her voice on the phone, her face on the computer. They are both growing older, missing each other deeply, and now the mother is trying to get the money and paperwork she needs to go home. The years are passing. Maggie Harris writes with a delicate compassion and beautiful control of imagery and voice, so that the reader is entwined with the pain and loss of Chantal as she learns to survive without her mother, but is always waiting and waiting. Harris’s evocative depiction of Caribbean landscape and culture bring another dimension to many of these stories: lush trees and wild rivers, people struggling to survive, striving against the odds. The second tale in the book is a highly charged and deeply moving story of a young man leaving his home and, with the money that his family has painfully raised, buying his way to a hopefully better and safer life. With the heart-breaking inevitability of pure tragedy, we follow his passage across the deserted landscape in the back of a truck, see the atrocities the human traffickers inflict on their helpless charges, the arrival at the sea shore, the scramble into the too-small boat. This is a timely piece of writing. Maggie Harris has humanised and personalised a human tragedy which continues night and day across many parts of the world. She leads the reader through the experience with such immediacy and empathy that we cannot distance ourselves from the events as they unfold. The book is filled with stories that pluck at the vagaries of human existence: the themes may be loss and regret, but they are also filled with the joy of life and love and landscape. Harris’s ability to pull in close and intimate with the lives of disparate people is compelling, from the mother who sees her daughter’s inability to deal with life and her own children but doesn’t speak out, to the man who has left his urban life to live in rural Wales. He loves it but his wife cannot make the transition. These are the patterns of human life – despair going hand in hand with hope, regret mixed up with longing.
Share
