List Of Writers

EVANS, CHRISTINE

Poet and prose writer. Christine was born in 1943 in Yorkshire and educated at Exeter University. In 1967, she moved to the Llyn Peninsula to teach English and still lives there with her husband and son. Much of her work has been inspired by periods spent on Bardsey Island, where her husband has worked as a lighthouse keeper and fisherman.

Cometary Phases (Seren 1989) won Wales Book of the Year in 1990. Growth Rings (Seren, 2006) was on the Wales Book of the Year 2007 Short List.

Selected Publications:
Looking Inland (Seren, 1983)
Falling Back (Seren, 1986)
Cometary Phases (Seren, 1989)
Island of Dark Horses (Seren, 1995)
Selected Poems (Seren, 2004)
Growth Rings (Seren, 2006)
Burning the Candle (Gomer, 2006)
Bardsey (Gomer, 2008)

Short Stories for Children:
Old Enough and Other Stories (Pont, 1997)

Contributed to:
The Blue Man and Other Stories (editor) (Pont, 1995)
Old Enough and Other Stories (editor) Pont 1997)
Trying the Line (tribute to Gillian Clarke) (contributor) (Gomer, 1997)
I Know Another Way (contributor) (Gomer, 2002)





I Know Another Way (contributor) (Gomer, 2002)

A diverse collection of six essays by Patrick Dobbs, Christine Evans, Jon Gower, Robert Minhinnick, Osi Rhys Osmond and Jim Perrin capturing the atmosphere and reflecting the feelings aroused on a journey along the ancient pilgrim route from Tintern Abbey to St David’s. 35 black–and–white photographs.





Selected Poems (Seren, 2004)

Winner of the inaugural Roland Mathias Prize, Christine Evans’ Selected Poems is an immensely wideranging and accomplished overview of this major poet’s work.

This persuasive volume by Christine Evans selects poems from her four published collections. Often set in the wind-swept, harsh but beautiful rural landscapes of north Wales, her work offers precise observation, lyrical commentary and sensitive portrayals of family and neighbours. Included here are the unusual long poems: 1986’s ’Falling Back’, a book-length, elegaic piece about a widow coming to terms with the death of her shepherd husband; ‘Cometary Phases’ where a winter of star-watching charts a son’s growth; and ‘Island of Dark Horses’ a celebration of the mysterious island of Bardsey, or Enlli, ancient site of Christian pilgrimage now home to a small farming community and a magnet for tourists.

In confident and ambitious pieces like ‘Deep Under’ and ‘Fodder’ the poet starts with externals and then moves deeper, using the landscape as metaphor for emotional or spiritual states. She can also do the reverse and use local detail to touch on the political and universal, as in ‘Small Rain’ about the effects of Chernobyl. Readers will appreciate how the author’s keen grasp of the local and particular leads out into the political and universal.

To purchase this title from Seren, please click on its front cover



Growth Rings (Seren, 2006)

This new collection from Christine Evans follows last years well-received Selected Poems (Seren, 2004). Hers is a sensitive and persuasive voice, highly attuned to the vagries of the seasons, to the landscapes and inhabitants of the beautiful Llyn Peninsula in North Wales where the author has made her home.

As well as vibrant short lyrics on everything from ’Bluebells in Nanhoron’ to jets flying over Wales, there are a series of tender, elegiac pieces on relatives, meditations on the last moments of Shelley and the fates of the Brontes, and a number of poems featuring the mysterious Island of Bardsey.

To purchase this title from Seren, please click on its front cover




Burning the Candle (Gomer, 2006)

Only some people are lured by ’the long poem’ - compelled, somehow, to filter and shape experience into a sustained, symphonic whole. In Burning the Candle, Christine Evans explores the nature of light itself, from match-flame to lighthouse beam, prism colours to golden cave of myth. And always there is light’s counterpoint: the darkness of night, and of death. Her narrative is engaging and personal, the tune of her words deceptively simple, but the spacious, ambitious ’long poem’ makes room for philosophical and spiritual questions which lead, almost in spite of themselves, towards the most tender of celebrations.

This memorable poem is accompanied by a log of its making and ’spin-off poems’ from the same period which provide a unique insight into how the writer was made ’alert, quickened, like a struck bell, sounding’.

To purchase this title from Gomer, please click on its front cover

The portrait of Christine featured here is by painter Lorraine Bewsey. It forms part of a twenty-piece collection entitled Portraits of Welsh Writers. Lorraine can be contacted at lorraine@lorrainesartstudio.co.uk