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Huw Lewis to Launch Memoir at the Pierhead

Huw Lewis to Launch Memoir at the Pierhead

Huw Lewis is a former Welsh Assembly member and Minister for Education in the Welsh Government, and is set to launch his memoir about growing up in Aberfan, To Hear the Skylark's Song, this Wednesday 5th July at the Pierhead, National Assembly for Wales. 

 

The weekend will see Huw attending the Penarth Literature Festival. On Sunday the 9th, at 2pm, he'll be in conversation with Dai Smith. You can see the pair discussing Huw's memoir at the All Saints Church in Penarth, tickets for the event are £5 and are available here.

 

Huw was also featured on Radio Wales' Sunday Supplement this past weekend. You can hear him talking about his memoir and childhood in Aberfan on the BBC iplayer here, at 32 minutes in.

 

 

To Hear the Skylark’s Song is a memoir about how Aberfan survived and eventually thrived after the terrible disaster of the 21st of October 1966, when Pantglas school took the full force of thousands of tons of colliery waste and a community lost a generation of children. It is a story about how people held a community together and created a space for each other to thrive.

It is also a wonderfully thoughtful and insightful story of what it was like to grow up in a Valley’s community in the 70s: a thriving place of people, shops, clubs, chapel concerts, coal mines, interwoven with gossip and stories and, of course, the annual bus trip to Barry Island.

Aberfan found a way to carry on, and Huw vividly brings to life how the sense of community provided strength and comfort in the shadow of a lifetime-long grief. A community that continues to innovate and inspire.

 

Huw Lewis was born in Merthyr in 1964. His father an engineer at the Hoover factory, his mother first a housewife, then a nurse. He has two older sisters and younger brother, they were all brought up in the village of Aberfan in south Wales.  

 

You can pre-order To Hear the Skylark's Song here.

You can find Huw on Twitter.