On Friday 11 May, it was announced that Hummingbird (Tristan Hughes) and Bad Ideas \ Chemicals (Lloyd Markham) are nominated for the Fiction Award at the 2018 Wales Book of the Year! Tristan's nomination is another indication that he is a premier contemporary writer and Lloyd's nod signals the beginning of an influential career ahead.
The third novel with Parthian, Hummingbird has proven to resonate with readers, winning at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards (ESTWA) and selling rapidly at independent bookshops beyond Wales. It is a homecoming of sorts. The setting is in Tristan's native Canada, and creates an atmospheric place that readers sink into. The category at the ESTWA that he won was aptly named: Fiction with a Sense of Place. Tristan's work is a testament to creating settings that are immersive and tamper with the traditional definition of a setting being a static entity.
Lloyd Markham's debut novel, Bad Ideas \ Chemicals, is known as much for its social satire as for its science fiction. Lloyd is a talented young writer whose vision for what can be done in a sleek 133 pages demonstrates that ambitious literature doesn't need to be War and Peace-length. Lloyd explained in his interview with The Cardiff Review that he started with a clear image, then wrote and re-wrote until Bad Ideas \ Chemicals started to take shape.
We will find out the winners of the 2018 Wales Book of the Year at the ceremony on 26 June 2018 at the Tramshed in Cardiff. Pick up your copy of Hummingbird in paperback or hardback, and don't forget to grab Bad Ideas \ Chemicals in paperback here.
