Outsider

6th February 2019.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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 […]

The Working Class Poet

12th July 2018.Reading time 20 minutes.

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 […]

What is the Role of the Poet in Society?

11th July 2018.Reading time 11 minutes.

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 Am Taliesin

9th July 2018.Reading time 22 minutes.

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 […]

Together, We Are Giants

5th July 2018.Reading time 1 minute.

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 […]

Nationwide Poets

25th June 2017.Reading time 16 minutes.

As the Nationwide adverts using poets continue to cause controversy I thought I’d repost this piece from earlier in the year first published on Sabotage Review. Perhaps it was the Kolkata heat, or the second glass of red, or impatience to head out that forced a knee-jerk ‘I’ll do it’ to Claire Trévien’s FB post […]

Oriel Davies Open Writing Competition

25th June 2017.Reading time less than 1 minute.

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!

Poetry and the National Trust

21st June 2017.Reading time 7 minutes.

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 […]

On Growing & Writing

20th June 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

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 bygwth)

10th June 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

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 […]