Mari Strachan was born into a Welsh family in Harlech, on the north-west coast of Wales, and was brought up there with Welsh as her first language.
After graduating from Cardiff University she qualified as a chartered librarian, and worked in a variety of libraries, from academic through public and prison to school libraries, with occasional forays into other occupations.
Blow on a Dead Man's Embers is her second novel, following the acclaimed The Earth Hums in B Flat.
She and her husband now live on a tiny smallholding in Ceredigion.
The World's Wife
Carol Ann Duffy
Poetry has always been a source of inspiration and comfort to me, and one of my favourite collections of poems is Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife: feminist,...
Little Women, Good Wives, Jo's Boys and Little Men
Louisa May Alcott
I can’t remember a time when I did not read and write, and I was quite young when I came across Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little...
Shadow of the Sickle (Cysgod y Cryman)
Islwyn Ffowc Elis
In my early teens I devoured Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s books, borrowed from our small town library. I was brought up in the Welsh socialist tradition, but Cysgod y...
The Bone is Pointed
Arthur W. Upfield
As a teenager I was also fed a diet of detective stories by one of my aunts. I don’t believe a book has to be great literature to...
Morality Play
Barry Unsworth
Everything I have ever read must surely influence my own writing. To choose just one influential book is difficult. But Barry Unsworth’s novel Morality Play does everything I...
Comments
There are some books here that will go on my reading list. Wonder if I will be able to get Shadow of the Sickle here in England.
Add a comment