Stop Press – Singing a Man to Death Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year

May has already been an exciting month here at Cinnamon Press. On May 1 we launched two fine collections at the Poetry Cafe: Edward Ragg’s award winning debut poetry collection, A Force That Takes and Daphne Gloag’s extraordinary Beginnings and Other Poems, which uses up to the minute cosmology for deeply personal themes written with great elegance. This was closely followed by the launch of Minorities Not Minority volume 2: poets from Romagna in Faenza, Italy. Six poets toured three venues with audience in a peripatetic extravangza of poetry (in Romagnolo and English) and jazz – just wonderful.

We’ve got more great events coming this month: On Thursday 16 we will be in Bangor to launch Mary J Howell’s award winning and compelling debut novel, Murielle’s Angel, Rosemary Wallace sets out to walk the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that once secured ‘points’ for getting into heaven, uneasy about whether she will fit in as a pilgrim… Then on Monday 20 we will be on the Thames, on board HMS Wellington, for the launch of Caroline Davies’s Convoy, a compelling narrative poetry sequence documenting the dramatic events of the Royal Navy’s Malta convoys to supply the besieged island in the Mediterranean Theatre in the Second World War. We end the month with the launch of A Handful of Water by Rebecca Devon, at a beautiful artist’s studio in Devon. You can find full details of the forthcoming events here.

And as if that wasn’t enough excitement we have the fantastic news that Matthew Francis’s funny, moving, compelling collection of short stories, Singing A Man to Death has been shortlisted as one of only three finalists in the fiction category of Wales Book of the Year. If you haven’t read this collection now is definitely the time and you can see a video of the short list announcement here.