Education
Following a serious illness, he returned to Wales, where he took a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics.
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Richard Gwyn
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After studying anthropology at the London School of Economics, he began to travel extensively across Europe, living for periods in Greece and Spain, working on fishing boats and as an agricultural labourer. His experiences of travel catalyzed his interest in writing, and he published several books of poetry and prose poems. Over the same period he also wrote two books on health, concerned with the ways that language and culture influence our understanding of illness, an area he researched for almost a decade.
He currently teaches at Cardiff University, where he is Director of the Master of Arts program in creative writing.
He has translated poetry from Spanish and Catalan and reviews books for The Independent. His first work of fiction, The Colour of a Dog Running Away, set in Barcelona, has received critical acclaim for its quality and originality, and has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian Chinese and Russian.
His second novel, Deep Hanging Out, set in Crete during the closing stages of the Cold War, was published in 2007 and is loosely based on the myth of the Minotaur. His work has been described as being concerned with the discarding of grand narratives and fixed meanings in order to pursue a more fleeting and fragmentary representation of the world.
His memoir The Vagabond"s Breakfast, published in 2011, has been called an "astonishing memoir of alcoholism, illness and redemption describing, in language of the utmost control, what it feels like to lose control of one’s life." Patrick McGuinness, writing in The Times Literary Supplement called it "a jagged tale gracefully told.
Full of humane surreality, there’s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together." Tessa Hadley, in the London Review of Books described it as "an enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray." In recent years Gwyn has developed his career as a translator of poetry and short fiction by Latin American writers. In 2011 he was invited to the International Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, the Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires (FILBA), the International Festival of Rosario (Argentina), the Fería Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, in Mexico and the International Festival of Medellín.
