The author, Richard Gwyn studied anthropology at the London School of Economics and became interested in the threatened cultures, languages and music of peripheral communities. After working in a number of jobs in London, from milkman to sawyer, he moved to Crete and bought a six-metre fishing boat, describing himself as a refugee from Thatcherism. For the next nine years he travelled on and around the Mediterranean forming enduring links with people, places and wooden boats. He returned to Wales in the early 1990s and now teaches creative and critical writing at Cardiff University.

The Colour of a Dog Running Away
Lucas, like a latter-day Montaigne or Yeats, sits in his tower, writing. There in the Catalan countryside he lives, alone with his dog and computer, recording his autobiographical story which forms the rest of the narrative of this highly original, beautifully written novel. His tale opens with a sudden shift to city life, as he relates the events which eventually led him to the tower. The thirty-three year old translator and editor of mixed Spanish and Welsh parentage, who has settled in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, finds his easy-going life suddenly disturbed by a series of strange, apparently unrelated incidents. An unsigned postcard summoning him to a rendezvous in an art gallery leads to his meeting with a young woman, Nuria, to whom he has become passionately and emotionally attached, but as soon as he starts to enjoy this new relationship his life begins to fall apart. Kidnapped by members of a mysterious sect reliving the lives of thirteenth-century Cathar martyrs, he finally escapes back to the city. Like a modern version of the medieval wildman he undergoes a long period of suffering in the urban wilderness, before he is finally able to be healed and finally achieve a moment of epiphany. The novel has some elements of the urban noir, but with its themes of exile, love and separation, with its people who may or may not be what they seem, this book is also profoundly rooted in older European myths and traditions, from the Bible to medieval romance and lyric poetry. The cast of characters is large and varied, from the seagull-feeding baron to the working class rabbit breeder, or the wild Roof People living their life of freedom high above the streets of the urban jungle. Each has a role to play in the life of Lucas and in that od Barcelona. This is a magical and memorable first novel by one of our most gifted contemporary poets.
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange