Poet, Steve Griffiths, is the guest at Sustainable Wales’s Green Room, 5, James St., PORTHCAWL CF36 3BG on FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 8pm. £3.00 entry. Followed by an open mic.
Steve Griffiths
Steve will be testing some of his ‘Late Love Poems’, due from Cinnamon in 2016, the press that has published his last two books.
Steve has given many readings in Wales, England, USA, France, and Spain, and has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Radio London and Radio 4 Cymru – most recently in December 2006 on Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. He has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Library of Wales' Poetry 1900-2000, featuring 100 twentieth century Welsh poets writing in English. He is keen to perform his new work more widely. Click here to read a response to a reading he gave for Wenlock Books in Shropshire in April 2007.
Steve spent his childhood on the beaches and cliffs around Trearddur Bay, not knowing that 35 years earlier one Ronald S.Thomas was getting his feet wet in the same pools. At the age of 11, he moved to Amlwch, the origin of al-Chwm in An Elusive State. After reading English at Cambridge at the end of the Sixties, he began a working life engaged with the consequences of, and some solutions to, poverty, inequality and poor health, first as a welfare rights worker in London, later as a researcher and consultant in social and health policy, in the last fifteen years working freelance all over Britain for local and national government, health bodies, and charities; and most recently in campaigning mode. This commitment has often squeezed out the poetry; but the quarrel between landscapes has created a defining tension in his work. He has constantly returned to the scene of his childhood for renewal. After forty years based in London, with his second wife Wendy he will be moving west to Ludlow this year. He was Vice-Chair of the Welsh Academy (English section) at the beginning of the Nineties, and is a Fellow of The Welsh Academy.
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