Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, Poetry Fellow in Lampeter, has been awarded a Published Writer’s Bursary by Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency which supports writers in creating new work.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch holding the awardThe three-month bursary, worth £5,000, will start on 1 July 2010 and will enable Samantha to start writing her next collection of poems. This collection will look at the unheard voices of witches, weavers and millworkers in West Wales and Lancashire between 1610 and 1910. The poems will aim to represent the social context of women in different eras but the same regions, particularly those working in the cotton and woolen industry whose experiences have not been fully explored in poetry before.
The links between witchcraft and the work of women in the textile industry will be explored using the concept of craft as textile, craft as witchcraft and craft as poem. There are significant geographic and historic connections between witchcraft and crafts associated with textiles in that Pendle Hill in Lancashire, once an unofficial centre for witchcraft in Britain, was at one time surrounded by mills.
