An Afternoon CREW Tea

To mark the end of a busy term, CREW hosted an afternoon of cakes and wine for its current cohort of students; a CREW tea rather than cream tea if you will (though we did overlook Welsh cakes and Bara Brith in favour of carrot cake, chocolate mascarpone muffins and chocolate, banana and peanut butter cupcake, and of course, mince pies).

The afternoon gave old hands and new a chance to meet one another, talk about their interests in Welsh Writing in English, and how perhaps we should try to persuade Only Men Aloud to stage a benefit concert for CREW PhD students as surely our cake-baking skills (second only to our writing and research skills of course) could surely fulfill any rider requests.

Winifred Coombe Tennant - A Life Through Art

An exhibition of works from the collection of Winifred Coombe Tennant, one of Wales' most significant art patrons of the twentieth century comes to Swansea.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Lord, renowned art historian and Research Fellow at CREW. It includes works by Evan Walters, Kyffin Williams, Gwen John and John Elwyn from both private and public collections.

This touring exhibition by the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth is at the Glyn Vivian Art Gallery 13 December 2008 - 15 February 2009.

There is an interesting article with some pictures on the BBC website written to mark the arrival of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Wales in the summer.

The picture here is by Evan Walters, Mother and Babe, 1919, oil on canvass, private collection.

The Art of Conversation

On the December 1^st edition of Radio 3’s flagship arts programme ‘Night Waves’, Daniel Williams discussed Dylan Thomas's radio play The Art of Conversation, with radio drama and documentary maker Piers Plowright and presenter Matthew Sweet.  Found by Thomas's biographer Andrew Lycett among a sheaf of papers, the play is a short piece of wartime propaganda, taking as its theme the decline of conversation. It also features 'contributions' from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Dr Johnson, frequently reminding listeners that 'careless talk costs lives'. You can listen again this week at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fr8h0

The play itself will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 11.30 am, December 3rd.

Raymond Williams study is Archbishop of Canterbury's "biography of the year"

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has selected a Swansea researcher's study of Raymond Williams as his biography of the year.

Professor Dai Smith holds the Raymond Williams Chair in Cultural History at Swansea University's Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW), which is based in the School of Arts. He published Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale in May 2008.

Following excellent reviews, he now joins authors Barack Obama, Martin Amis and Stefan Zweig on the 2008 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Books of the Year list.

Writing in the TLS on Wednesday 26 November, The Archbishop of Canterbury describes Professor Smith's biography as "a completely engaged, imaginatively dense study of someone who was with good reason a sort of moral touchstone for one important strand in the British Left".

Raymond Williams is widely held to be one of the one of the most influential socialist writers and thinkers in post-war Britain. He introduced radical new approaches to the theory and practice of culture as a social dynamic and is regarded as one of the last, great male intellectual figures of the 20th Century.

He is also seen as Wales' major intellectual figure of the 20th Century. By the end of the 1950s he had broken down the academic barriers between different forms of study, such as literary criticism and sociology.

For more see http://www.swansea.ac.uk/news_centre/LatestNews/Headline,29509,en.php