Lampeter graduate Judith Arnopp has recently published her first novel, Peaceweaver, which has already received some very positive reviews.
Peaceweaver is the story of Eadgyth, an women sold into marriage, and tells a tale of loss, betrayal, passion and war highlighting the plight of women tossed into the tumultuous sea of feuding in Anglo Saxon Britain. Peaceweaver is published by You Write On.
Hot on the heels of Peaceweaver, Judith has also had a volume of poetry accepted for publication. Waving at Trains is a collection of poems examining the human desire to be remembered after death which involve the Judith’s personal experiences of childhood in the London suburbs during the 1960s when “all the women wore aprons and children were expected to behave”.
Judith says “Nobody was more surprised than me when Lapwing publisher Dennis Greig became excited about the prospect of publishing my little collection. I had considered them to be of personal interest only; they are not at all clever, just simple recollections of a past era, peopled by those I remember. I would never have got so far as publishing any of my writing without the input of Dic Edwards and William Marx in the Department of English and Janet Burton in The Department of History at the University of Wales Lampeter. Enrolling at Lampeter provided a whole new range of possibilities for me.”
Richard Montgomery, an observer of and commentator on poetry and literary culture, says of the poems “These are a delightful evocation of childhood during the 1960s in Britain. Everyone’s story will of course be different, however these poems act as a comparator to the ghastly, contemporary, premature aging of today’s children. In some ways perhaps these poems represent the hiatus between the awful era of Victorian child labour and the equally awful era we are now in. They certainly contrast with the brutal and desensitised realities that mar growing up across great swathes of these islands.”
