Russell Celyn Jones

CELYN JONES, Russell

Russell Celyn Jones is the author of six novels, including Soldiers and Innocents, which won the David Higham Prize, and Ten Seconds from the Sun, which won the Weishanhu Prize in China. He has served as a judge for the Booker Prize and worked as a journalist and book reviewer for The Times, The Sunday Times and The Observer, among many others. He is emeritus professor of creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. 

Articles

Land of my fathers

Non-fictionOn Saturday mornings his friends would call in to pick him up for the game. Like him, they were broad and tall and humorous, and never still. None of them ever seemed comfortable indoors. Their faces were fevered from sitting in winter stadiums. Even as septuagenarians they continued to refer to themselves as ‘the boys’, and if my mother materialised before them, they’d blush like children.

Revolutionary wave

Non-fictionThis was the late ’60s, early ’70s and surfing in Wales was regarded by the parent generation as delinquency. It was for losers, layabouts, rogue males. In those early days Welsh surfers numbered around one hundred, congregated on half a dozen beaches down fifteen miles of coastline west of Swansea, known as the Gower. I knew each one of those surfers by the styles they deployed on the waves. So idiosyncratic was early Welsh surfing that out on the road if you saw a car with boards on the roof coming at you, both drivers would pull over for a chat.

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