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Cardiff-based authors Lloyd Markham and Crystal Jeans have opened a bookshop in Duke Street Arcade, Cardiff to sell their new novels with their Festival of Bad Ideas this week. The Carnival bookshop popped up on Sat 1 July stocking copies of Bad Ideas\Chemicals, the dark, weird debut novel by Lloyd Markham published by Parthian that has already garnered a cult buzz amongst other top writers:

‘A dark and witty take on small town life.’
– David Towsey

‘bleak, weird, grim, cool... it will probably become a cult classic.’ – Rhian Elizabeth

'Some writers try to do weird. Some writers do weird. Lloyd Markham is weird.' – Christopher Meredith

The shop also stocks Crystal Jeans' second novel Light Switches are my Kryptonite by Honno:

'In Sylvester, Crystal Jeans has created a character as evocative and alluring as her own name. Her book is an amazing piece of literary ventriloquism; convincing, moving, funny, flawlessly sustained, and utterly compelling.' – Niall Griffiths

as well as her first novel, The Vegetarian Tigers of Paradise (Honno) recently longlisted for the Polari First Book:

'Think Caitlin Moran in Gabalfa, Cardiff - dysfunctionality made humorous and page-turningly entertaining and moving.' – Tony Curtis

Uršuľa Kovalyk is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and social worker. She was born in 1969 in Košice, eastern Slovakia and currently lives in the capital, Bratislava. She has worked for a women's non-profit focusing on women's rights and currently works for the NGO Against the Current, which helps homeless people. Kovalyk is the director of the Theatre With No Home, which features homeless and disabled actors. She has published plays, short stories and novels, and was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera 2014 for Krasojazdkyña (The Equestrienne). I lived several lives in the brief instant before my feet touched the ground. The music stopped....

Last Friday saw the award ceremony for the 2017 Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award, at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea. Writers included in the collection, which is published by Parthian, read poetry and extracts from their prose during an evening which is dedicated to nurturing fresh voices in the memory of a beloved poet and friend.   Runner-up Poetry | 1st Prize | Runner-up Fiction Thomas Tyrrell | Christopher Hyatt | Katya Johnson  The winner of the award's £1000 prize was Cristopher Hyatt, who's short story 'The Unreasonable Ambition of Steelman, Raymond' about a retired demolition worker who dreams...

'The poems in Rebel Sun knit together all of the various elements of experimentation, politics and community I’ve been immersed in over recent years, with a strong focus on (re)connecting with the natural world. I am as much a part of the north Wales landscape as any oak or wave or starling and Rebel Sun is acknowledgement of that.'

'Explaining the exact nature of a poem feels too didactic, but this collection is absolutely about taking a stand politically. I see the after-effects of colonialism as a patriarchal dish still being force-fed to the land and her people in Wales. But after a long winter, maybe spring is coming.'

Read the poem and the blog in full on the Poetry Wales website

Buy Rebel Sun from our online shop

Several years ago. on my way home from a night out, I paused on the old bridge near the centre of town to look at the water below. I think it must have rained upstream or something because the river was surging. It looked strangely inviting to my drunken mind. I stood there watching the murky water for a long time and felt a perverse urge to jump in. Then, a passing police officer, as if sensing the bad ideas in my head, bellowed at me from the other side of the bridge, “Hey, mate, are you okay?” snapping me out of my trance.

Bad Ideas\Chemicals is a book about moments like this. Moments when you feel hypnotised by some irrational urge you cannot fathom. 

It is also a book about self-destruction.