Cheval 12

Published regularly since 2009, the Cheval anthologies are compiled of winners and entrants in each year’s Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award. Established in memory of the late poet, the award is intended to highlight poetry and prose as mediums through which young people can express themselves. Now in its twelfth instalment, this anthology continues a long line of Cheval as an incredible platform for emerging young writers from and living in Wales. Cheval 12 opens with this year’s winner - Eleanor Howe and her poem ‘The Fox’. It is a simple and vivid description of an encounter with a fox that’s full of sensory images. Having never had her creative writing published before, ‘The Fox’ is a brilliant way to introduce Howe’s creativity to the world in print. Runners-up Nathan Munday and Cynan Llwyd similarly impress. Munday’s ‘Gheorghe and Furnicuta’ is formally innovative in its telling of a missing Moldovan cow herder, while Llwyd’s ‘The Humiliation of Basboosa’ is incredibly vibrant in its description of poverty in Tunisia. For a collection so intrinsically Welsh (entrants to the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award must live in or be from Wales), Cheval 12 is by no means limited in its themes and locations. From Moldova and Tunisia, through to Wigan and dystopian futures, this collection is nothing but varied. What is consistent and recurs throughout is a sense of what it means to be young in today’s world. Laura James-Brownsell’s ‘The Day the Earth Died’ is a terrifyingly real portrayal of a ‘what if…’ future where we keep turning a blind eye to climate change. Samuel Hulett’s ‘Flood Plain’ plays with similar themes and even manages to bring Brexit into the mix. Both act as reminders that the idea of running out of drugs and extreme weather are not just some quirky topics for the young to explore in literature, but are very real issues that we all need to be addressing. Elsewhere in the collection Millie Meader’s ‘Interview with a Welshman’, Daniel Williams’s ‘Riding an Elephant’ and Megan Thomas’s ‘None the Wiser’ all contrast the young and old in different ways and to different effect. Williams’s is perhaps one of the sweetest stories in the collection, while Thomas’s is notable for its dark twisted humour. In a collection published to provide a snapshot of English-language Welsh literature of the moment by young writers, nothing feels as though it sums up the peculiarity of modern life like Emily Cotterill’s ‘John King (Disambiguation)’. In a few short opening lines, Cotterill takes in figures from the public historical past, discovered in the online present while hunting for something from her personal recent past. It’s clever, amusing, observational and tinged with sadness all at once. Cheval 12 is an excellent and varied collection and shows the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award to be a high-quality literary prize and a great legacy for Hetherington. Reading this and looking back at past winners (Costa-winning Jonathan Edwards won in 2010), it’s safe to assume that while this is the first time published for many of these writers, it won’t be the last. -- Liam Nolan @ www.gwales.com