List Of Writers

WILLIAMS, GEE

Email: g.williams@exeter.oxon.org
Website: www.geewilliams.info

Poet, short storyist, novelist, scriptwriter, editor, radio broadcaster. Born in North Wales. Degree in English and Education, Culham College, Oxford. Former lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature, now full–time writer. Poetry Society/ Poetry Review New Poet, summer ’97; Poet in Residence, Flintshire County, 1998. Numerous magazine and anthology pieces. Numerous prose scripts for Radio Wales and Radio 4 and two full–length plays. Shortlisted for the Richard Imerson Award and Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media awards. Rhys Davies Award, 1996. The Book Pl@ce Contemporary Short Story Award 2003.

Gee’s first novel Salvage (Alcemi, 2007) was voted winner of the Pure Gold Fiction Award in 2008 by Welsh readers and is short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 2008. Her short story collection Blood, etc (Parthian, 2008) was on the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Short List. Click here to read an extract from this title.

Reviews:
With respect to Magic and Other Deceptions (Gwasg Gee, 2001):

"…Meaning to do no more than skim, I found myself still there an hour later, guzzling the stories one by one like sweets in childhood…"
Stevie Davies, New Welsh Review

With respect to Salvage (Alcemi, 2007):

“…we are caught and hooked upon a multi-layered murder-mystery. There Williams feeds us little entrails to keep the haunting pages turning only to find, at each change of narrator, that we chose the wrong starter for the main course….Salvage is a gripping, unpredictable read that endears each of its colourful characters to us, flaws and all…”
Susie Wild, Planet

“…The novel has the distinction of being both a page-turner and one you want to savour. …Salvage is the least predictable novel I’ve read in a long time…”
Sally Quilford, The New Writer

“…Williams’ writing is off-beat, subtle, haunting, fresh…”
Kate Long

"…A controlled and gifted stylist, Williams is inventive and inspiring in her craft. Salvage masquerades as a murder mystery while exploring the less sunlit aspects of the Welsh shoreline and of the human soul. Dominant and daring in her prose, Williams relishes the act of writing and constructs five distinct characters with genres particular to each, as well as a provocative intervention of the author herself. Salvage constantly shifts the literary goalposts from crime to romance to a metafictional crisis while never losing the immediacy of the characters or the suspense of the crime…”
Prof Colin Nicholson, University of Edinburgh and the James Tait Black Prize for fiction

With respect to Blood, etc (Parthian, 2008)

"…stories that reflect Williams’s strength as a writer…individual stories stand alone as unique microcosms – sometimes disquieting, often challenging, never static…"
Suzy Ceulan Hughes, with permission of the Welsh Books Council


Selected Publications:
Magic and Other Deceptions (Gwasg Gee, 2001)
Salvage (Alcemi, 2007)          
Blood, etc (Parthian, 2008)

Contributed to:
Tilting at Windmills (contributor) (Parthian, 1995)
Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (contributor) (Parthian, 1999)
Death On Stanley Street (editor) (Word Weavers, 2001)
Mirror, Mirror (editor) (Honno, 2003)
A Dang’rous Thing (editor) (Word Weavers, 2003)



Magic and Other Deceptions (Gwasg Gee, 2001)

16 short stories most of which were broadcast by Radio 4 or Radio Wales. They are set in a stretched, leanish strip of land running along one bank of the Dee…from…boat-building, cattle-rendering Saltney, through spit-on-your hands Shotton to chemical Flint and on to the peeling painted tarts of Talacre and Prestatyn.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover


Salvage (Alcemi, 2008) 

A short break in a shoreline cottage is an ideal place to struggle with your demons. For Martin and Elly it is a chance to forget their hasty exit from Paradise following scandal. But Elly makes a life-changing find on the tideline – a huge diamond ring, finger-bones still attached. As we begin to question who the ring and its finger really belonged to, the cottage collects the secrets of those friends and strangers who have stayed there. Why does Elly have such power over them all?  

Ranging between Wales, the north of England and Goa, this is a novel about possession, betrayal and violence – and just how much we can afford to lose.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover


Blood, etc (Parthian, 2008)

Blood, etc contains fifteen stories.

In ’Free Again’, teenager Teg has the worst night out ever in Liverpool. In ’Weed’ rural Welsh families drive a priest into drug-dependency: then God himself materializes. 

Whether, as in the title story, it’s spilt on the road or just stays coursing through the veins, blood is what they are all concerned with.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover

Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:

1. Read and discuss own work

AGE RANGE: Adult