Matthew Francis

Delightful new versions of a great Welsh medieval poet's lyrics - intimate, urgent and timeless Dafydd ap Gwilym, Wales's greatest poet, explored love, desire and the natural world with startling frankness and virtuoso wit. In a sequence freely adapted from Dafydd's work, Matthew Francis brings him to life for the modern English-speaking reader: as he waits in the woods for his lover, ogles the girls in church or causes chaos during a midnight assignation. Plants, birds and animals are fondly invoked while weather and the elements - wind, waves, fog and ice - play their part. Passionate in his treatment of sexual themes, Dafydd is equally ready to make fun of his own susceptibility. These delightful poems remain, across the centuries, intimate, urgent and timeless. 'Matthew Francis's lively versions of the verses of medieval poet Dafydd ap Gwilym pay skilful tribute to the randiest of bards' Suzi Feay, Financial Times, Best New Poetry

Delightful new versions of the great Welsh medieval poet's lyrics - intimate, urgent and timelessDafydd ap Gwilym, the pre-eminent poet of Wales, explored love, desire and the natural world with startling frankness and virtuoso wit. In a sequence freely adapted from Dafydd's work, Matthew Francis brings him to life for the modern English-speaking reader: as he waits in the woods for his lover, ogles the girls in church or causes chaos during a midnight assignation. Plants, birds and animals are fondly invoked while weather and the elements - wind, waves, fog and ice - play their part. Passionate in his treatment of sexual themes, Dafydd is equally ready to make fun of his own susceptibility. The Green Month introduces an original and lovable poet who speaks freshly to us from deep in our islands' past.

Scraps: In rural 2003 Montana, two closeted teen boys navigate skateboarding, harsh small-town judgment, and a summer of unexpected young love.MLM Teen Gay RomanceSmall-Town SecretsBreathtaking Montana LandscapesHeart-Pounding Skateboarding ActionPerfect for fans of Call Me by Your Name, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Mid 90s, and Heartstopper.When Gus Shepard's shy artistic life is upended by his mother's death in 2003, he's sent to the rural town of Livingston, Montana to live with his estranged woodworking father. For Gus, it's a place filled with grief, forgotten childhood memories, and too much sawdust -until he meets Bridger Owens, a local skateboarder with a rebellious streak.Drawn together by a deal for Gus to build Bridger a handcrafted board in exchange for skate lessons, the two boys form an unexpected bond. The boys inspire each other to both reach for bigger goals and make the most of their short summer. What starts as friendship soon blossoms into something deeper, a tender romance they must keep hidden in a town where everyone already knows your secrets. But in a town this small, escaping feels impossible. Being... Gay? Unthinkable. Bridger's Jealous skate crew leader Max Stevens is suspicious of Gus and his growing closeness to his best friend. And the coolest skatergirl in town, Tara Shae, senses that Gus, like her, doesn't quite fit the town's mold. As whispers turn into confrontations and family pressures mount, Gus and Bridger's fragile relationship is tested at every turn. Through late-night swims, daring skate sessions, and moments of breathtaking vulnerability, Scraps paints an unforgettable picture of discovering young queer love in the early 2000s. Will Gus and Bridger risk everything to hold onto what they've found, or will the weight of their separate worlds pull them apart?

Scraps: In rural 2003 Montana, two closeted teen boys navigate skateboarding, harsh small-town judgment, and a summer of unexpected young love. MLM Teen Gay RomanceSmall-Town SecretsBreathtaking Montana LandscapesHeart-Pounding Skateboarding ActionPerfect for fans of Call Me by Your Name, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Mid 90s, and Heartstopper.When Gus Shepard's shy artistic life is upended by his mother's death in 2003, he's sent to the rural town of Livingston, Montana to live with his estranged woodworking father. For Gus, it's a place filled with grief, forgotten childhood memories, and too much sawdust - until he meets Bridger Owens, a local skateboarder with a rebellious streak.Drawn together by a deal for Gus to build Bridger a handcrafted board in exchange for skate lessons, the two boys form an unexpected bond. The boys inspire each other to both reach for bigger goals and make the most of their short summer. What starts as friendship soon blossoms into something deeper, a tender romance they must keep hidden in a town where everyone already knows your secrets.But in a town this small, escaping feels impossible. Being... Gay? Unthinkable.Bridger's Jealous skate crew leader Max Stevens is suspicious of Gus and his growing closeness to his best friend. And the coolest skatergirl in town, Tara Shae, senses that Gus, like her, doesn't quite fit the town's mold. As whispers turn into confrontations and family pressures mount, Gus and Bridger's fragile relationship is tested at every turn. Through late-night swims, daring skate sessions, and moments of breathtaking vulnerability, Scraps paints an unforgettable picture of discovering young queer love in the early 2000s. Will Gus and Bridger risk everything to hold onto what they've found, or will the weight of their separate worlds pull them apart?

A historical crime fiction novel set in Victorian London's gaslit theatre scene, where ghosts lurk in the shadows and murder takes centre stage.Gaslight. Ghosts. Murder.Hastings Wimbury has always dreamt of playing Hamlet, but for now he works as a theatre gas-boy. Here, he tends to a gas chandelier so powerful it creates its own weather, and limelight machines that can throw a shadow onto a wall ten miles away.When Hastings suddenly disappears, his fiancée Flora sets out to find him with the help of Cassie, her rival in love who is more preoccupied with the ghosts terrorising the streets of London. Soon total darkness is imposed upon the city, and they realise that something far more sinister is at hand…Ladies aren't supposed to solve mysteries, but this is a matter of life and death.

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process.Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing.Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show, don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.

Like his acclaimed Mandeville (2008), Matthew Francis's fourth Faber collection explores a world of marvels, real and fantastic. A man takes off for the moon in an engine drawn by geese, a poltergeist moves into a remote Welsh village, and a party of seventeenth-century Englishmen encounter the wonders of Russia - sledges, vodka, skating and Easter eggs. The scientist Robert Boyle basks in the newly discovered radiance of phosphorus (the noctiluca of the title) and the theme of light in darkness is taken up by the more personal poems in the book: phoneboxes, streetlamps, moonlight. The joys of the world and of the imagination find their equivalent in Francis's joy in the possibilities of language: 'A basket of snow for the Empress / with a poem of modest triumph: / I made this out of what does not last.'

Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process.Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing.Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show, don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.

Matthew Francis's latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies, while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to the 'witchy-beetle, forkin-robin' of dialect. Francis's love of history, embodied in his acclaimed Mandeville and The Mabinogi, gives rise to a sequence based on Robert Hooke's microscopic observations. There are tributes to the poets Basho, Dafydd ap Gwilym and W. S. Graham, to fireworks, apple varieties and hot toddies. And, in a moving elegy for a friend killed in a parachute accident, Francis shows us a vertiginous vision of a world where even the dead 'sleep on the wing'.

Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 'Here at the turn of the leaf a horseman is ridingthrough the space between one world and another . . .' The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's retelling of the first four stories (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world: a baby is kidnapped by a monstrous claw, a giant wades across the Irish Sea to do battle, a wizard makes a woman out of flowers, only to find she is less biddable than he expected. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder.The Mabinogi is an important contribution to the storytelling of the British Isles.'I have waited a life for this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in their original Welsh. This is more than translation. It picks up the harp and sings.' Gillian Clarke

Like his acclaimed Mandeville (2008), Matthew Francis's fourth Faber collection explores a world of marvels, real and fantastic. A man takes off for the moon in an engine drawn by geese, a poltergeist moves into a remote Welsh village, and a party of seventeenth-century Englishmen encounter the wonders of Russia - sledges, vodka, skating and Easter eggs. The scientist Robert Boyle basks in the newly discovered radiance of phosphorus (the noctiluca of the title) and the theme of light in darkness is taken up by the more personal poems in the book: phoneboxes, streetlamps, moonlight. The joys of the world and of the imagination find their equivalent in Francis's joy in the possibilities of language: 'A basket of snow for the Empress / with a poem of modest triumph: / I made this out of what does not last.'

William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) is increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century. In playful but profound exercises in self-reflexivity, such as ‘Implements in their Places’ and ‘What is the Language Using Us for?’, he lays down a challenge to his readers which this book takes up. What exactly is he saying about language, and how are his concerns related to the apparently similar ones of postmodern theory? Matthew Francis offers a surprising answer: the theme of language in the poems is inextricable from that of community. Writing, for Graham, must always justify itself in terms of an idealized model of community based on his working-class Clydeside childhood. His work is haunted by guilt: in becoming a writer he felt he had betrayed his family and background. He attempts to assuage this by means of an ingenious metaphor that presents language itself as a community. Francis traces the development of this metaphor from the experimentalism of the early poems through the complexities of Graham’s most ambitious poem, ‘The Nightfishing’, to the subtlety and daring of the late work. Finally, he looks at some intriguing unpublished writings, and shows that their resistance to closure and dalliance with automatism are further attempts to solve this problem. Here as elsewhere, Graham’s brilliant rhetoric and deep insight into language are products of a quest for a mythical linguistic community, ‘where the people are’.

Following the adventures of its eponymous hero from birth through three decades, this acclaimed stage adaptation presents a plethora of brilliant characters from the original novel: the Peggottys; 'umble Heep; eccentric Aunt Betsey and Steerforth, young David's champion. Two actors play David Copperfield: one the young David, the other David's older self, each interacting throughout.10 women, 13 men

Huckleberry Finn's adventurous journey along the Mississippi is captured in this adaptation of Mark Twain's classic novel. It thrives on the use of minimal set and prop devices to illustrate the many locations.

Catherine Morland lives for much of her time in a fantasy world of romance and mystery based on the Gothic novels of her time, the early 1800s. But a stay in Northanger Abbey leads her into a series of misjugdements and a farewell to her Gothic world, only to be dealt a cruel blow in the real one.

This adaptation of Dicken's famous epic novel of the French revolution tells the story of English lawyer Sydney Carton and French aristocrat Charles Darnay, both caught up in the bloodshed of the French Revolution. The dramatization attempts to stay close to the atmosphere of the original text, by utilizing a simple set, with numerous lighting changes and sound effects, minimal props and vivid stage images.

Adapted from the novel by Anthony Hope. This fine imperialist adventure is brought vividly to life in Matthew Francis's stirring adaptation which plunges straight into the heart of the Ruritanian dynastic conflict. Rudolph Rassendyll, young English gallant, is distantly related on the wrong side of the blanket to the Ruritanian royal family. When the Crown Prince is drugged by Black Michael, Rudolph steps in and takes the Prince's place at his coronation.2 women, 9 men, 4 women or men