Biography

Eluned Gramich is a writer, translator and editor, originally from west Wales. She has a BA in English Literature from Oxford University, an MA in Creative Writing (Prose) from the University of East Anglia, and she has recently completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Aberystwyth and Cardiff Universities, funded by the SWW DTP. She has lived in England, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan, and now she has settled in Aberystwyth where she works as a librarian in the National Library of Wales. She spends her free time learning languages, going for rambles in the countryside, or just relaxing in the garden on sunny days with her husband and daughter.

Eluned’s short stories and creative essays have appeared in several magazines and anthologies. Her memoir, Woman Who Brings the Rain, won the inaugural New Welsh Writing Awards and went on to be shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2016. She is currently taking part in the literary exchange programme, Ulysses’ Shelter, organised by Literature Across Frontiers. Most recently, a short story, ‘Arawn and her dogs’ was commissioned and broadcast on Radio 4’s Short Works programme. Her début novel, Windstill, is out in November 2022 with Honno.

Pre-Order Windstill with Waterstones or your local independent bookshop!

 

 

My Publications

Windstill

 

Set in Hamburg in 2015, this compelling début novel by a Welsh-German writer finds Lora staying with her German grandmother following the death of her grandfather. With the arrival of two uninvited guests including Lora’s ex-boyfriend, tensions lead to the uncovering of family secrets – Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller (May 2022)

Out with Honno in November 2022! Pre-Order with Waterstones or your local independent bookshop

 

 

Cover of Sleep Training. An eerie black and green cover showing a cot shrouded in darkness.

Sleep Training

 

Elin, Mark and baby Padarn move into their first house together – a house bought unusually cheap – as Mark relocates them in order to start a new job. Lonely and trapped in an increasingly volatile and disquieting marriage, Elin’s world begins to unravel in self-doubt and paranoia: is something else visiting her baby at night, keeping him awake? Soon, a series of terrible secrets crawl out from between the cracks.

An unsettling contemporary ghost story by the winner of the Ghastling Novella Prize 2020, this is an extremely tense and haunting tale that promises to have the reader riveted and turning the pages to the very end.

Get your copy directly with The Ghastling!

An orange and blue abstract cover for An Open Door anthology

An Open Door: New Travel Writing for a Precarious Century

Eluned’s personal essay on meeting her Brazilian in-laws in Rio de Janeiro is part of this exciting travel writing anthology, edited by Steven Lovatt. The history of Wales as a destination and confection of English Romantic writers is well known, but this book reverses the process, turning a Welsh gaze on the rest of the world.

Taken together, the stories of An Open Door extend Jan Morris’ legacy into a turbulent present and even more uncertain future. Whether seen from Llŷn or the Somali desert, we still take turns to look out at the same stars, and it might be this recognition, above all, that encourages us to hold the door open for as long as we can.

Cover of Cast a Long Shadow showing trees, a misty lake, and a figure in an orange anorak.

Cast a Long Shadow: Welsh Women Writing Crime

This is a collection of 20 specially commissioned crime short stories written by women in Wales. Eluned’s story, ‘The Ship’, is set in a pub in Aberystwyth and tells the story of the mysterious murder of a four-year-old boy.

This is a striking anthology of the widest range of crime short stories from contemporary urban thriller to historical rural mystery and the speculative and uncanny. 

 

Woman Who Brings the Rain

In her prizewinning début, Eluned Gramich takes us on her own journey of discovery into a strange land, Hokkaido island in northern Japan. As she gets to know her host family, gradually adjusting to their ways, her command of Japanese increases and she begins to read the natural landscape, teasing out the underlying, often hidden connections between the island’s landscape and its history and culture. 

Women on Nature

Eluned’s story, ‘Flowers of Wales’, is part of this landmark anthology, which brings together the work of over a hundred women, from the fourteenth century to the present day, who have written about the natural world in Britain, Ireland and the outlying islands of our archipelago. Alongside the traditional forms of the travelogue – the walking guide, observations of birds, plants and wildlife – Women on Nature embraces alternative modes of seeing and recording that turn the genre on its head.

Hometown Tales Wales

Alongside Tyler Keevil’s brilliant mystery, this book includes Eluned’s novella ‘The Lion and the Star’.  A vivid retelling of the Welsh language protests that electrified Cardiganshire in the 1970s and the impact of the protests on ordinary lives.

Zero Hours on the Boulevard

Included in a diverse and fascinating anthology, where writers from across Europe embark on a journey of independence and belonging, is Eluned’s story, ‘The Book of New Words’. The story follows the 11-year-old Mareike as she leaves home in small town to Germany to go to school in southern England: an experience that turns out to be completely different to what she’d imagined.

Eluned’s

Writing Prizes

Winner of The Ghastling Novella Prize 2020

Highly Commended in the Penfro Short Story competition 2018

First Prize in the Stiwdio Maelor Short Story Competition 2017

Second Prize in Bare Fiction Flash Fiction Competition 2017

Second Prize in the Aestas Short Story Competition 2017

Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year with Woman Who Brings the Rain 2016

Winner of the inaugural New Welsh Writing Awards: People and Places 2015

Runner-up for the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award 2015

Shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize 2011

Publications

Fiction

  • Windstill (Honno) – out November 2022
  • ‘The Ship’ in Cast a Long Shadow: Welsh Women Writing Crime (Honno, 2022)
  • Novella, Sleep Training, out with The Ghastling: https://theghastling.com/sleep-training-novella/
  • ‘Arawn and her dogs’, a short story broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Short Works’ programme in May 2021
  • ‘Flowers of Wales’ in Women On Nature: An Anthology edited by Katherine Norbury (Unbound Books, 2021)
  • Hometown Tales: Wales (London: Orion Books, 2018), co-authored with Tyler Keevil. My novella, ‘The Lion and the Star’, is about the Welsh-language protests in Aberystwyth in the 1970s.
  • Woman Who Brings the Rain (Aberystwyth: New Welsh Rarebyte, 2016), a memoir of Hokkaido. Arabic translation published in 2019.
  • ‘The Book of New Words’ in Zero Hours on the Boulevard: Tales of Identity and Belonging (Cardigan: Parthian, 2019).
  • A short story, ‘Cream Horns’ in the Penfro anthology Heartland (Cardigan: Parthian, 2019).
  • ‘The Grey Sea’ in IDEES, a Catalan magazine. The story, a vision of the future of Europe, commissioned by the editor Martí Sales. The story has been translated into Catalan and Spanish. It can be accessed online here: https://www.revistaidees.cat/en/46–the-future-of-the-european-project/the-Grey-Sea
  • ‘After the Stag’, Cheval Anthology (Cardigan: Parthian, 2019).
  • A short story, ‘White Thread’ in The Lonely Crowd, Issue 10, 2018.
  • ‘Pulling Out’ in New Welsh Short Stories (Bridgend: Seren Books, 2015)
  • ‘Oku Hanafu’ in Rarebit: New Welsh Fiction (Cardigan: Parthian, 2014)
  • ‘The Sunflower Seed’ in Stand Magazine, Issue 3, 2014.
  • ‘The Small Holding’ in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Spring Issue, 2014.
  • ‘The Frog’ in Notes on the Underground, Summer Issue, 2012.
  • ‘The Milk Jug’ in Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (Bristol: Tangent Books, 2012).
  • ‘Ghost Homes’, a short story exploring community and the pandemic in Question Journal (Forthcoming)
  • ‘Something beginning with V’, short story commissioned by Literature Across Frontiers and Parthian Books for an anthology of new European writing in English (Forthcoming in 2022)

Essays

  • ‘Carioca Cymreig’ in An Open Door: Travel Writing for a Precarious Century (Parthian, 2022)
  • Chapter titled ‘England is not a template: Wales, VE Day and Covid’ in Covid, the Second World War and the Idea of Britishness as part of the series British Identities since 1707 (Peter Lang, Forthcoming)
  • ‘Housewiferly Slurry’ in Wales Arts Review, November 2020. Online here: https://www.walesartsreview.org/the-housewiferly-slurry/
  • ‘Slwtsch Gwraig Tŷ’ in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (Summer 2020). A hybrid essay exploring working mothers’ experiences during the pandemic.
  • Yr awyr ranedig’, a Welsh-language creative non-fiction piece on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, commissioned by O’r Pedwar Gwynt.
  • ‘A Burden of Memory: Inherited Trauma, Fiction, and the German expulsions’, Journal of Language, Text and Society, Spring issue, 2018
  • ‘Y ddwy deyrnas’ (The Two Kingdoms) in O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Summer Issue, on Rainer Maria Rilke, travel and mental health, 2017.
  • ‘Brexit: The Brutal Business of Citizenship’ in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 229, 2017.
  • ‘Becoming British’ in Wales Arts Review, 2017
  • ‘The Accidental Thread’ in New Welsh Reader, Winter Issue 113, 2016.
  • ‘Canolbarth yr Almaen’ (The Heart of Germany) in O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Summer Issue, 2016.
  • How Japan Cured My Writer’s Block’ in Wales Arts Review, 2016
  • ‘Roast Beef and Wasabi Sauce’ in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Spring Issue, 2014.

Selected Reviews

  • Review of The Magician by Colm Tóibín in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (Spring Issue 2022)
  • A review of Akiyuki Nosaka’s short story collection The Cake Tree in the Ruins (London: Pushkin Press, 2018) for Wasafiri
  • Review of Reparation by Gaby Koppel and God’s Children by Mabli Roberts in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 235 (Summer, 2019)
  • ‘A Dancing Clod of Earth’, a review of the ‘Cartographic Imaginaries’ exhibition in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Issue 234 (Spring, 2019).
  • Review of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden (Pushkin Press) for Japan Society. https://www.japansociety.org.uk/42579/spring-garden/
  • Review of the Keshiki Series (Stranger Press) for the Japan Society. https://www.japansociety.org.uk/43075/keshiki-series/

Translation

  • Alex Wharton, tr. ‘Gute Dinge kommen’. (Original poem: ‘Good things to come’) for Literature Wales’ Plethu/Weave arts project
  • Bayerische Staatsoper, La Juive by Fromental Halévy (opera surtitles)
  • ‘Island and Earth’, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, co-translation of Naha Kanie poems with Hiromitsu Koiso
  • ‘Drwy’r Ffenest’, Taliesin. Translation from Japanese into Welsh of an extract of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles.
  • Monique Schwitter, Goldfish Memory (Parthian: Cardigan, 2014). Translation of German National Book Prize nominated Monique Schwitter’s short story collection.

    Selected Literature Events

    • Speaker on panel ‘Questioning Neutrality’ at the Literary Translation Centre, London Book Fair April 2022.
    • Author Reading and Panellist at the British Council Literature Seminar and Literaturhaus Stuttgart March 2021.
    • Public readings and panel discussions at the London Book Fair and at the Morlan Centre, Aberystwyth, as part of the launch tour of Zero Hours on the Boulevard
    • Reading and panel discussion at Hay Festival with Tyler Keevil and Dylan Moore, May 2018.
    • Reading and panel discussions at Jaipur and Hyderabad Literature Festivals, India. Fully funded by Literature Across Frontiers. ‘Writing from Europe’, Hyderabad Festival, and ‘In Many Tongues’, Jaipur Festival.

      Editing and Proofreading

      Eluned has proofread several MA and PhD dissertations for postgraduate students, especially where English is the student’s second language. She has also proofread novels for the Library of Wales series, including Glyn Jones’ The Valley, The City, The Village and Hilda Vaughan’s The Battle to the Weak.

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