Welsh Poets address the Anthropocene: Hywel Griffiths, Mererid Hopwood, Mererid Puw Davies

Part of UCL Anthropocene’s Writers of the Anthropocene series, in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Studies. This event is in person.

We are excited to welcome two distinguished Welsh-language poets, Mererid Hopwood and Hywel Griffiths, to a bilingual reading in Welsh and English, in UCL’s series ‘Writers of the Anthropocene’, alongside Mererid Puw Davies (UCL). Chaired by Anna Koch (UCL).

Hywel Griffith’s readings at this event are inspired by his work on Anthropocene human impacts on rivers in Wales and elsewhere, often drawing inspiration from field work and studying archival sources.

Mererid Hopwood will read poems that stem mainly from her recent work on ‘Listening to Landscape’, in which she explores two aspects of human interaction with the environment: the militarisation of land, sea and air; and the relationship between words and apparent wilderness.

Mererid Puw Davies will read poems which reflect on the often fragile interconnections of language and landscape.

About the speakers:

Mererid Hopwood is Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University and Secretary of Academi Heddwch Cymru (the Wales Peace Institute). She has spent her career studying and teaching languages and literature. She has won the Chair and Crown for poetry at the National Eisteddfod, the Prose Medal, the Welsh Book of the Year Prize (poetry category), and the Tir na nOg prize for Children’s Literature. She has been Children’s Laureate for Wales and has worked with many musicians and composers in Wales and abroad. This year she will receive the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry.

Mererid Puw Davies is Professor of German Studies at UCL, where she teaches and researches many aspects of German and comparative literature and culture. She is also an essayist and poet in Welsh.

Hywel Griffiths is a poet and Reader in Physical Geography in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University. He has won the Chair and Crown at the National Eisteddfod, the Tir na nOg prize for Children’s Literature and the Welsh Book of the Year (poetry category). His fourth collection, Y Traeth o Dan y Stryd was published in March. He mainly writes in the Welsh strict meter of cynghanedd, but has also published in English in Poetry Wales and cultural geographies. A fluvial geomorphologist by training, he is particularly interested in collaboration between the sciences and the arts.

Anna Koch is the Francis L. Carsten DAAD lecturer at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European History. She received her PhD from New York University in 2015. Her book ‘Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust’ is forthcoming with Indiana University Press in November 2023. She has published on Italian, German and Jewish history, and currently researches the flooding of the South Tyrolean village Graun/Curon.

There will be a drinks reception after the event - please join us for a glass of wine!