Take Three Canadians: Four Stories, Three Writers, and an Artist

Art designed and illustrated by Catrin Menai. With an afterword by Tyler Keevil. Four mesmerising stories interwoven with words, images and memory as ideas of your place in the world shift across tides of time and energy, people and place.

Gail Hughes was an adventurer and linguist. She settled in Bangor, north Wales after travels in Europe and the Middle East. She began writing stories about her childhood and adolescence in southern Alberta, Canada in the 60s influenced by Alice Munro and Katherine Mansfield. They were published to critical acclaim as Flamingos, a year before her death in 2001. Tyler Keevil was born in Edmonton, raised in Vancouver, and moved to Mid Wales in his twenties. He began his career by writing stories and novels about the life he knew on the West Coast of Canada. His works include No Good Brother, Fireball and Burrard Inlet. The story in this book, Sealskin, won the Journey Prize, Canada’s most prestigious short story honour. He now lives in south Wales with his wife Naomi and their two children. Catrin Menai is an artist and writer from north Wales. Her practice explores the relationship between landscape and self, layering poetic fragments, correspondences, and archival materials across time, place, and language. Her work has been exhibited at Mostyn and The Turner House, published in the Artes Mundi Journal and Poetry Wales, and translated in collaboration with Literature Across Frontiers. Currently, she is studying a PhD at the Aberystwyth School of Art and the National Botanic Gardens of Wales, focusing on nature restoration past and present. She is the daughter of Gail Hughes. Tristan Hughes was born in Aitkokan, northern Ontario, Canada. His parents met at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, and he grew up first in Canada and then Ynys Mon, an island off the coast of Wales. After completing his education in the UK he began writing short stories, winning the Rhys Davies award, and since then he has published award-winning novels set both in Wales and Canada. The story in this book, Up Here, won an O. Henry award, an annual prize awarded to the best stories published in north America. He is a reader in creative writing at Cardiff University.