I'll be giving a reading at the Windsor Arms in Penarth, this Thursday (July 2nd). It's a Cardiff University event and kicks off 6:30pm. I should be on 8ish, either with some novel-in-progress or else some reflections on Vilnius. So now you know.

If you're in London, have a look out for Gold - a free magazine, available throughout the city. Some of the stockists are listed here. It includes a story called 'The Man In the Dream' I wrote some years ago, but recently unearthed and revised and found pleasantly confusing...

For Lithuanian speakers with an interest in Welsh literature, this extract from Tuesday’s ‘Good Morning’ television programme is imperative viewing. (Skid forward to 2:39:30 on the player.) It showcases a glorious couple of weeks I’ve just spent in Vilnius with Latvian poet Inga Gaile and Belgian novelist Stephane Lambert, on the invitation of Books From Lithuania. Non-Lithuanian speakers will gain little, since we are dubbed, but I can say that Stephane is talking about the actress Marie Trintignant, murdered by her rock star boyfriend Bernard Cantat in Vilnius in 2004, Inga is obviously talking about the sky - she spoke a great deal about the size of the sky in Vilnius - and I’m probably talking about cemeteries, which may explain why I’m not permitted to say very much, if not why I look even more knackered than I did recently on BBC 2 Wales. If this were a film on Imdb I would add to the trivia section that Inga gets up from the swing because it has just made an ominous splintering noise.

At any rate, you do get to see what a very beautiful city Vilnius is.

Its graveyards have become a source of great fascination for me lately. The shelves beside my desk are concealed beneath an enormous map of the city, on which every cemetery and burial site I’ve been able to discover is marked in black biro, and a bottle of that delicious Lithuanian herb brandy Trejos Devynerios is to hand in case of waning morbidity. So far it remains pretty full. The first few days in a new (to you) country are, of course, always particularly interesting. As you are struck by those things that are different to your normality, so you have a brief opportunity to see a place and a culture with great clarity. My normality involves a lot of Welsh churches and churchyards, so it is, I suppose, natural that I should have been drawn to both the city’s famous baroque churches and its cemeteries. Essentially, it was the history that these places reveal that grabbed me - from the memorials to the NKVD victims at Tuskulenu, to the bulldozed Evangelical Cemetery in Taurakalnis Park, to the site of the Jewish genocide at Paneriai - although, from a writing point of view, those people who live in these same places now, that contrast with the past, is every bit as interesting. For example, the site where the bodies of 2000 soldiers from Napoleon’s Grande Armee were discovered in 2001 is occupied both by the former Red Army barracks (now a technology park) and some rather up-class apartment blocks, belonging to the new, post-Soviet middle classes. My story, ’The Graveyards Of Vilnius’, will be included in a Lithuanian anthology in November.

All my thanks to the ladies at Books From Lithuania, the wonderful Inga and Stephane, and to Catrin from Wales Literature Exchange, who was good enough to contact me in the first place.

Here's a couple of dates for the diary.

One: ‘From Wales to Timbuktu’ - two programmes made for BBC2 Wales, following four promising young writers from Gwernyfed High School, here in Powys, to Mali’s legendary city on the edge of the Sahara desert. Elly, Oli, Laura and Emma are well worth the watching in themselves, but the soundtrack is formidable too - featuring everyone from Toumani Diabate to Oumou Sangare - and if you watch closely you will see me make appearances as a ‘writing mentor’/ shadowy svengali figure.

Tune in on Thursday 14th May, and Thursday 21st May, both at 7:30 pm.

Two: NEWFOUNDLAND FESTIVAL. Two years have, mysteriously, very nearly passed. Newfoundland Music and Lit Fest is on again, September 4th-6th - much bigger, with five stages, and hopefully as blissful as last time. There are many many details still to be arranged, but you might like to know that it will be held very near to Rhayader, in mid-Wales, and that we have confirmed several writers, including:

JASPER FFORDE

NIALL GRIFFITHS

TIFFANY ATKINSON

JAMES MILLER

BRIAN CHIKWAVA

AND, OF COURSE, REBBECCA RAY AND MYSELF AND SEVERAL MORE TO COME...

For details of the bands, and to buy tickets (£38 for three days’ camping!) please visit www.newfoundlandfestival.org.uk

The past couple of weeks have brought a flurry of interesting things along with the snow (which continues to ice the Black Mountains outside my window, and pretty well everything else) so I thought I would note one of two of them down here. The first is the new edition of Caradog Prichard’s ‘One Moonlit Night’ from Canongate, which I was asked to review for the Financial Times just before Christmas and has haunted me for many days. The review, incidentally, is scheduled for Feb 14th. According to the Encyclopaedia of Wales, “many regard [‘OMN’] as the finest Welsh-language novel” and, as if that weren’t reason enough to go and (re)read it at once, the new edition has an introduction from Jan Morris and an afterword from Niall Griffiths (whose own fine novels, as he acknowledges, bear its influence). A near-autobiographical account of a young boy living with his widowed mother in the Snowdonian slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, set against the distant backdrop of the First World War, ‘OMN’ succeeds gloriously where a number of books I’ve read over the past year simply don’t. Richard Vaughan’s ‘Moulded In Earth’ gets the people and the landscape, but can’t seem to decide if it's written by Catherine Cookson. Caradog Evans’s ‘My People’ has all the fire and the dirt – and the wit – but, Lord, what a vicious piece of writing. ‘OMN’ shows a bleak, violent world, but with love and sympathy and shining imagination.

Caradog Prichard

That stands out among the books I’ve read in the past 12 months. Well, actually, five books stand out, most of which I ought to have read before: ‘OMN’, Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’ (Oh…), Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’, Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘All Quiet On the Western Front’ (Christ), and Brian Chikwava’s ‘Harare North’.

Brian Chikwava

Now, Brian has been a very good friend of mine since we met in Harare about thirteen years ago, when he was writing a novel called ‘The Machine’, which described the life of a disaffected quantity surveyor in Robert Mugabe’s Harare, who looked not a little like himself. He showed great flair as a writer back then, and thoroughly deserved the 2004 Caine Prize for his story ‘Seventh Street Alchemy’, but, fond of him as I am, I really wasn’t prepared for ‘Harare North’. I read it recently, here at my desk, and reached the end at about 2 in the morning, in a shaken condition. I thought, and I still think, that he has done to Zimbabwean literature something like Thomas Mapfumo did to Zimbabwean music. The story concerns a Zimbabwean exile in London, a nasty nameless piece of work and a former Green Bomber (Mugabe thug), who has come simply to earn some money and get a flight home. The story is engaging, but the thing about the book is the voice. As Thomas Mapfumo drew on the riches of Shona musical culture and translated them through electric instruments, so Brian has taken Zimbabwe’s rural outlook, its proverbs and phrases, and translated them through London: the Harare North of the title. The result throws both into mesmerising relief. It comes out in April, and if everyone else doesn’t join The Observer in heralding Brian the literary prospect of the year then there is nothing right or true in the world.

Elsewhere, well, I am polishing a story for the April/May edition of London’s Gold Magazine – on which, more presently – and acting as a kind of literary mentor on a BBC Wales programe, which will send four 17-year-olds from Gwernyfed High School (between Brecon and Hay-on-Wye) to Timbuktu in Mali. Among the more pleasant events of last week was an invitation to take part in a residency in Lithuania in May.

I think it’s the snow. It puts you in a good mood, even when you’re up to your neck in the stuff.