Nigel Jarrett

I'm a former daily-newspaperman and a double prize-winner: the Rhys Davies Award for short fiction and, in 2016, the inaugural Templar Shorts award. My first story collection, Funderland, published by Parthian, was praised by the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and many others, and was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize.

My début poetry collection, Miners At The Quarry Pool, also from Parthian, was described by Agenda poetry magazine as 'a virtuoso performance'. My first novel, Slowly Burning (GG Books) was published in 2016, as was my second story collection, Who Killed Emil Kreisler? (Cultured Llama Publishing).

In 2019, Templar published my three-story pamphlet, A Gloucester Trilogy.

Based in Monmouthshire, I also write for the Wales Arts Review, Arts Scene in Wales, Slightly Foxed, Acumen poetry magazine, and several others. I am a regular contributor to Jazz Journal magazine. My poetry, fiction, and essays appear widely. For many years I was a daily newspaper music critic, and now freelance in that capacity. I'm represented in the Library of Wales's two-volume anthology of 20th- and 21st-century short fiction.

In April 2021, the Chaffinch Press, Dublin, was due to publish my fourth story collection, Five Go To Switzerland, but it reneged on the contract in January of that year. I would advise all aspiring authors to give this company short shrift.

As an endorsement of the manuscript that Chaffinch accepted then rejected, Rob Mimpriss's Cockatrice Books, in North Wales, took it on and published in November 2022.

Before that, another go-ahead Welsh independent, Saron Publishers, brought out Notes From the Superhorse Stable, a work of long fiction which comes at the novel from a different and, I hope, interesting angle. It was published in June 2022 and was the subject of a successful launch.

Nation Cymru reviewed both books. internet links are not allowed in these author bios but if you search 'Nigel Jarrett: Nation Cymru' you'll find them. Both books were nominated for the Wales Book of the Year award 2023 but didn't make the final cut. I wrote a piece for Nation Cymru about not making the final cut.

In March this year (2024) Cockatrice brought out my second poetry collection, Gwyriad, which centres on the concept of instability and has a central section based on where I live - a former psychiatric hospital - and visits to the former Bristol Pauper Lunatic Asylum, now the Glenside campus of the University of the West of England. 'Instability' is treated widely, and the final poems deal with death, the full point that ends all our hopes, strivings and achievements and gives human life its existential absurdity. I read from the collection, and from Miners At The Quarry Pool, at the April 2024 session of Poetry Upstairs, the famous and long-running series of poetry readings in Abergavenny, now held at the Melville Centre for the Arts. Joining me at the microphone were John Barnie and Simone Mansell Broome. Each of us had something different to offer. Today, I guess a poem is what a poet says it is. It's amazing, though, how little we have learned since William Carlos Williams wrote The Red Wheelbarrow over a century ago. I'm currently (May 2024) at work on a novella - my first - set in the late 1920s in the region around Hay on Wye, the celebrated 'Town of Books' and location of the annual international Hay Festival.