Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Absolute Optimist: Remembering Eluned Phillips
    Unavailable
    Absolute Optimist: Remembering Eluned Phillips
    Unavailable
    Absolute Optimist: Remembering Eluned Phillips
    Ebook347 pages5 hours

    Absolute Optimist: Remembering Eluned Phillips

    By Menna Elfyn

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Eluned Phillips was a passionate woman who ignited equally passionate responses in others. The second woman ever to wear the National Eisteddfod crown – Wales’ most prestigious Welsh language literary prize – she is the only woman to have won it twice. Unfortunately, her writing life was blemished by rumours over her work’s authorship.

    Unusual among Welsh women of her generation, Eluned embraced an unconventional lifestyle which took her to pre-war London and Paris, where she met artists Augustus John, Edith Piaf, and Pablo Picasso, as well as the writer Dewi Emrys, the dissolute ex-preacher and poet whose biography she published in 1971. In France she also fell in with a group of idealistic Bretons who introduced her to romantic love and nationalist politics.

    This is an affectionate and yet critical biography of an unsung heroine of Welsh literature during a time of great change – taking her from rural Carmarthenshire to bohemian Paris and urban Los Angeles. She was often frowned upon, but never less than true to herself.

    Award-winning poet Menna Elfyn examines Phillips’ life and work and argues convincingly that Eluned’s poetry is undoubtedly hers and more than worthy of two Crowns. Absolute Optimist was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year on publication in Welsh. It has been translated for Honno by Elinor Wyn Reynolds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHonno Press
    Release dateJul 26, 2018
    ISBN9781909983816
    Unavailable
    Absolute Optimist: Remembering Eluned Phillips
    Author

    Menna Elfyn

    Menna Elfyn is a poet and playwright who writes with passion of the Welsh language and identity. Her bilingual selections, Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994 from Gomer and Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 from Bloodaxe were followed by two bilingual collections, Murmur (2012) and Bondo (2017), also from Bloodaxe. She also co-edited The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) with John Rowlands. When not travelling the world for readings and residencies, she lives in Carmarthen. She was Wales’s National Children’s Laureate in 2002.

    Read more from Menna Elfyn

    Related to Absolute Optimist

    Related ebooks

    Literary Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Valentine’s way AN WILSON Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life

      Jun 2, 2021

      Handheld Press £15.99 One old reviewer found a tear rolling round his cheek towards the end of this book. When the poet Valentine Ackland went into hospital with breast cancer, she wrote to her lover of 38 years, novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘You

      3 min read

    • Article

      De La Mare Revisited PAUL DEAN Reading Walter De La Mare

      Jun 30, 2021

      Faber £14.99 At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there. De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of

      2 min read

    • Article

      ‘Some Of The Most Startling Portraits In Existence’: Hans Holbein’s Mini Masterpieces

      Oct 25, 2023

      I am in the Haus of Holbein, to quote the techno number from the hit musical Six. Or anyway, I am in the house of Windsor, which still owns many of Renaissance artist Hans Holbein’s portraits of the Tudor court. They will go on show at the Queen’s Ga

      5 min read

    • Article

      Sculptor, Wrecker And Seducer

      May 27, 2021

      Sculptor, Wrecker And Seducer
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Wimple Plan

      Dec 11, 2020

      A Wimple Plan
      3 min read

    • Article

      Lady Hester Stanhope

      Nov 23, 2023

      Lady Hester Stanhope
      2 min read

    • Article

      Back Draft: Ada Limón

      Jul 18, 2022

      Back Draft: Ada Limón
      9 min read

    • Article

      Encounters

      Nov 24, 2022

      Encounters
      3 min read

    • Article

      'See What Can Be Done' Is A Testament To The Breadth Of Lorrie Moore’s Intellect

      Apr 2, 2018

      See What Can Be Done, novelist and short story writer Lorrie Moore’s first nonfiction collection, takes its name from the words of Robert Silvers, the late editor of The New York Review of Books. When Silvers would send Moore a book for possible revi

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Room Of One’s Own

      Mar 16, 2020

      A Room Of One’s Own
      2 min read

    • Article

      Palais Garnier

      Jan 26, 2023

      Palais Garnier
      3 min read

    • Article

      TALKING POINTS The Write Stuff

      Aug 6, 2020

      TALKING POINTS The Write Stuff
      1 min read

    • Article

      Emily, Rewritten

      Jan 6, 2023

      The most mysterious member of the Brontë family, Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848 at the young age of 30, leaving just one novel, Wuthering Heights, and a collection of poetry as her legacy. Yet, she is still recognised as one of the world’s gre

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock

      Dec 9, 2020

      I’d gotten what I’d wanted—a room full of books and time enough to read them—but at a cost. The post A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of Genius

      Jun 10, 2021

      Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson Bloomsbury, 512 pages, £25 DH Lawrence has proven to be an endlessly fascinating subject for biographers. There is his working-class upbringing as the son of a collier; the scholarships he won

      1 min read

    • Article

      Baron Corvo’s Grave

      Jan 6, 2022

      Baron Corvo’s Grave
      3 min read

    • Article

      Live On TV: History At Work

      Oct 27, 2022

      Live On TV: History At Work
      5 min read

    • Article

      Erotic Espionage

      Jul 6, 2023

      Erotic Espionage
      1 min read

    • Article

      Q&A

      Jun 9, 2022

      Q&A
      4 min read

    Reviews for Absolute Optimist

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words