Real Port Talbot

The Real Series

by Lynne Rees, Peter Finch (Editor)

Port Talbot is for many a version of the ‘Valleys-by-the-sea’ and certainly its heavy industry, shoehorned into a narrow belt of flat land, feels like a twenty-first century throwback to coal-mining Rhondda. It is the result of an old fashioned local industrial baron building a port to export his coal, and of the politically-inspired siting of heavy industry in the post-war period. But it has a more genteel past as a resort, and may have a more dynamic ‘clean’ future as a centre of environmental research and practice. The cultural event that was ‘The Passion’ in April 2011 is a further clue as to new directions which the town might take. That event also links to Port Talbot’s other famous export, actors: Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen.

Real Port Talbot – the latest in the Real series – takes Michael Sheen’s description of the “small but mythic town of Port Talbot ... a town of earthly and sometimes unearthly delights”, and goes in search of those delights. Using the series mix of history, the author’s personal memories and oblique approaches to the physical aspects of the locale, Lynne Rees explores her past and discovers a place both familiar and unexpectedly new. Her text is accompanied by similarly oblique photographs of the town.

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2013

About the author

LYNNE REES aka the hungry writer is a poet, novelist, psycho-geographer, blogger, editor, creative writing tutor, food lover and liver of life to the full-er. Born in Port Talbot, South Wales, she has lived in the Channel Islands, Florida, Barcelona and Antibes, in the south of France, but home is currently a working apple farm at the foot of the North Downs in Kent, UK.

Her next book will be published by Cultured Llama in Autumn 2015: 'eat, live, write: a year of hungry writing' is a simmered reduction and seasoning of four years of the hungry writer blog with 12 recipes, 52 reflections and 365 writing prompts for other hungry writers.