BANGOR based Cockatrice Books has held a book launch on Zoom to celebrate the publication of new fiction by local writers, Anna Reynolds and Rob Mimpriss.

Supporting the launch were the climber and writer, Jim Perrin, the poet Angela Topping, and the award winning writer John O’Donoghue.

Anna Reynolds said: “My writing has always been inspired by the Conwy Valley, where I grew up, by seeing the empty cottages and houses, and by imagining the lives of the people who might have lived in them.”

Her novel, Of the Ninth Verse, ends when Idris, running the farm after the death of his father, commits suicide, and his sister, who has been helping him farm, sells the property and takes her son to Australia to live.

Anna who runs a blog called The Places Where We Go (https://theplaceswherewego.blogspot.com) about ruined places in north Wales, said: “Even though it’s a difficult book in some ways, with difficult themes, I wanted it to be a tribute to the people who have farmed the Conwy Valley.”

Rob Mimpriss’s stories are set in imaginary countries in Central Asia and Latin America, drawing on science fiction and Greek and Welsh myth, and the work of Welsh writers, Kate Roberts and John Gwilym Jones.

Rob said: “I wanted to use these short stories to strip away the details in fiction and reveal something unexpected and new. I wanted to reflect on the way Wales’s relationship with Europe has changed, and what that says about our future as a nation in the UK.”

Rob Mimpriss also runs Cockatrice Books, which over the last five years has been publishing Welsh history and folklore, Welsh fiction in English, and original fiction and translations from Welsh.