An Evening with Francesca Rhydderch and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

We are delighted to welcome sisters Francesca Rhydderch and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch to discuss their newly released books.

It Might Not Be True is Francesca’s memoir of life and love, written following a recent medical diagnosis. She is learning to live a new life, a quieter existence which brings its own moments of joy. When she isn’t walking or writing at her own pace, she can be found in the company of her friends, family and a dog named Bean.

Milk Wood Memoir is Samantha’s 4th poetry collection and opens with a handful of family recollections of Dylan Thomas, including Samantha’s grandfather’s presence in the poet’s house on the night he was shot at in March 1945.  In a series of eco-elegies, she explores how the wood of Under Milk Wood is turning into a floating forest due to coastal erosion. The paths once walked by Dylan Thomas between his bungalow and the pubs of New Quay are slowly collapsing into the sea, taking with them both trees and houses. We are taken by the hand and shown the joys and sadnesses, excitements and fears behind the doors of the town she believes is key to Under Milk Wood

Francesca Rhydderch is a fiction writer whose début novel The Rice Paper Diaries was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize. She was also shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘The Taxidermist’s Daughter’. Her short stories have been published by Comma Press, Honno, Wales Arts Review, New Welsh Review and Planet, and have also been broadcast on Radio 4.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has published four poetry collections and three pamphlets. Her work has twice been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year as well as for the Michael Marks Award. Recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, Samantha was Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the National Wool Museum in 2012. In 2015 she won a Creative Wales Award to write the performance piece Tango in Stanzas. Her work was highly commended in the Forward Prizes in 2009 and 2013 and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Samantha has taught on the Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford University and at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wales in 2022.