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Country Boy, a volume of autobiography by Seren author Paul Groves, has just been brought out by Welsh publisher Starborn Books at £7.50.  His account of a journey from the innocence of childhood to the first independent achievements of adulthood, via the hazardous straits of adolescence, will strike a familiar chord with many a reader whose formative years were the sixties and seventies.

It is not only this sharing of common experience which makes the book, once started, so hard to put down, it’s the reader’s inevitable delight in the colour and flow of the narrative, and in what Craig Raine has called Groves’s ’technical skill, crisp imagery, intelligent irony, and attractively sour outlook on life’.  Such qualities are particularly evident in the later chapters, where religion has to face the wholly unfair competition of sex and, of course, loses.

Country Boy, Starborn Books
£7.50
To order your copy from Amazon, click here.

Paul Groves
Born in Gloucester in 1947, the poet Paul Groves has lived in Wales and in the Forest of Dean. He is a Gregory Award recipient and a major prizewinner in numerous competitions. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Introduction 3 (Faber), The Bright Field (Carcanet), Burning the Bracken (Seren). He is a Creative Writing lecturer and Open College of the Arts tutor, and has 30 years’ teaching experience.

In 2007 and for an unprecedented second time, Paul won first prize in the Times Literary Supplement competition for his poem ’The Mauve Tam-o’-Shanter’. The prize was judged anonymously, with a reader ballot choosing from a shortlist of eleven poems. ’The Mauve Tam-o’-Shanter’ is included in Paul’s new collection Qwerty which will be available from Seren in March 2008.