Dear Friends, We’ve been living in our van on the road now for over a year and are currently on the south coast of Crete. If you’d like to keep up with my travels and the work growing from this hop over to the OUTSIDER blog. Cheers! See you there 🙂 Sophie x Photo by […]
This piece first appeared on Wales Arts Review in May 2018 as part of their series on working class voices in the arts in Wales. Sophie McKeand’s two-year-tenure as Young People’s Laureate for Wales comes to an end shortly. Here in the latest instalment of the Wales Arts Review series looking at working class voices […]
This piece first appeared on Wales Arts Review in December 2016. What is the role of a poet in modern society? Sophie McKeand writes about the overwhelming challenge facing artists today: to speak up or stay silent? The Politics of Authenticity I’m writing this at 5.30am on a Friday morning. Later today will involve catching the train to […]
I’m going to post some pieces written for other publications here over the next few weeks, so that they’re all in one place. I’m going to start with I Am Taliesin, which first appeared on the Dark Mountain blog as part of their ‘The Mythos We Live By’ series. This week we continue ‘The Mythos We […]
I was recently commissioned by the Aneurin Bevan University Hospital to write a poem to celebrate 70 years of our wonderful National Health Service. I’m deeply honoured to be involved with such a project as all of my family have relied on the NHS over the years – some of us wouldn’t be here without […]
I’m delighted to be judging the Oriel Davies Open Writing Competition along with the lovely and talented Chris Kinsey. Closing date 4th November. If you’ve read Rebel Sun you’ll know I’ve had a slight obsession with writing about water (dŵr) for some time so I’m really looking forward to reading the submissions!
Over the last week I’ve been fortunate enough to work with local young people at two National Trust properties: Tredegar House in Newport and Chirk Castle, on the north Wales border. Organised and facilitated by Literature Wales as part of the Young People’s Laureateship, each residency lasted two days and a lot of fun was […]
I was born to the sound of starlings murmurating across the north Wales coastline. The Rebel Sun rode low in an early February sky as the Irish Sea gnawed across my ribcage. My hair was knotted seaweed. Water swelled sand dunes into my belly & a flock of seagulls took up residence in my mouth. […]
Expectation (neu addo a bygwyth) is one of the political poems from Rebel Sun. The Russian-inspired propaganda artwork by Andy Garside giving the reader the heads-up that left-wing socialist/Marxist/anarchist politics will inform elements of the content. Over a decade ago, when first starting out writing, everything I created was political but after a while I […]