This month we're releasing a new Library of Wales version of Rachel Trezise's award winning debut novel, In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl, so Rachel is our Author of the Month.
About Rachel:
Born in the Rhondda valley in 1978, Rachel is an award-winning author and playwright. She graduated in Journalism and English in 2000 - the same year that Goldfish Bowl was published.
Her published work includes In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl, Fresh Apples (which won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Prize 2006), Dial M for Merthyr (Winner of the Inaugural Max Boyce Literary Prize 2010), the play 'Tonypandemonium' (Theatre Critics of Wales Award for Best Production in the English Language 2014), Sixteen Shades of Crazy, and Cosmic Latte (Winner of the Edge Hill Readers' Prize 2014). Her writing has also appeared in the anthologies Sideways Glances, Rarebit (Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month January 2014), and Story Volume II. She co-edited the anthology How to Exit a Burning Building (2015). Her first radio play 'Lemon Meringue Pie' was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2008.
Trezise was writer of residence at the University of Texas in spring 2007, and was described as ‘the new face of (British) literature' by Harpers & Queens magazine. Her work has been translated into several languages and has been published in Australia and New Zealand, Denmark, Ethiopia and Italy. She is married and still lives in Wales.
About In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl:
In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl was the debut semi-autobiographical novel from Rachel Trezise, and won the Orange Futures Award.
The story of a brutal childhood in the Welsh Valleys; Rebecca is trying to grow up fast but the whole world’s against her. She falls in love, gets drunk and takes drugs. There are things she needs to forget. But when writing and books take hold of her life she starts to come up from the bottom.
The book is studied in most Welsh Universities and is on the British Literature reading list at the University of Montreal.
