Stowaway A Levantine Adventure

This collection recounts a number of journeys that the stowaway of the title, a kind of anti-Ulysses, takes around the eastern Mediterranean, journeys that transcend historical time and incorporate elements of the mythic and the magical, as well as actual historical phenomena, from the fall of Byzantium to the Syrian civil war and the emergence of Islamic State or Daish. Sometimes the speaker in the poems is the stowaway himself, sometimes his account is overlaid by a retrospective narrator or the autobiographical interjections of the poet. In this way the stowaway’s story and the telling of it merge in a fragmented, multi-layered narrative.

Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. Following several years in London, he spent a decade travelling on and around the Mediterranean, much of it recorded in his award-winning memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Cardiff University and the author of three previous collections of poetry and three novels. Both his fiction and poetry are widely translated.