Our speaker in July 2020 was Dewi Heald, who writes books, novellas, poetry, blogs and writes and plays his own music too. He claims that his hobbies include trampolining and lying about trampolining.
After studying at Aberystwyth and living for several years in Cardiff, Dewi is now based in Llantwit Major, which is the setting for his novella, “Me, I’m Like Legend, I Am” which won the Highly Commended Award in the New Welsh Review’s Dystopian Novella Competition at the Hay Festival 2019. Dewi explained at the time that “I was watching the film ‘I am Legend’ and I started to wonder why the last survivor of the apocalypse is always living in New York or Los Angeles, so I wrote a version where the last survivors on earth live in Llantwit Major.”
Dewi has published two collections of short stories, “Cheese Market of the Future” and “Freaky Tuesday” as well as a book of political essays, “The Seven Pillows of Wisdom” and a novella “The Tale of Charlotte the Liberator”. In recent years, he has increasingly been fascinated by setting traditional stories in Welsh settings and is currently working on a time travel novella based in Aberdare and a full-length novel about further education based in Swansea. Dewi describes his output as off-beat and designed to make people laugh and think at the same time.
Six years ago, he set himself the task of visiting all 400 of the UK’s Quaker Meeting Houses over the next 40 years. Twelve of those visits are the subject of his recent non-fiction book, “A Travelling Quaker Writes: Volume One”.
In 2020, Dewi will be promoting the publication of “Me, I’m Like Legend, I Am” and continuing research for a proposed self-help book about dating, written on the back of “thirty years of accidental research about relationships”.
Find out more about Dewi on his website: dewiheald.wixsite.com/rainbows