The Writers of Wales Database

GRIFFITHS, JAY

c/o Jessica Woollard, The Marsh Agency, 50, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BD
Tel: 02074 934361
Email: Jessica@marsh-agency.co.uk
Website: www.jaygriffiths.com

Jay Griffiths was born in Manchester and grew up outside London and has spent most of the last decade in mid-Wales. She is the author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time which won the Barnes and Noble “Discover” award for the best new non-fiction writer in the USA, 2003, for which her book was cited as “cleverness in the service of genius.”

Her book Wild: An Elemental Journey was the winner of the inaugural Orion Book Award, 2007 and shortlisted for the Orwell prize and for the World Book Day award. She wrote Anarchipelago, a short novel operating as “found fiction”, which is an account of the road protests of the mid-nineties.

Jay has written occasional journalism for various publications including The Guardian, The Observer, the Ecologist, the London Review of Books, The Utne Reader, Wild Earth and the Idler. She is a columnist for Orion magazine and a Member of The Welsh Academy.

Jay Griffiths has written for a Radiohead publication 'The Universal Sigh'. Her work has been used on the album Tiger Suit by KT Tunstall and she has been interviewed to discuss her work by Nikolai Fraiture of The Strokes who is featured reading her work for the making of their latest album.

Reviews:
With respect to Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time (Flamingo, 1999):

“…A thoughtful, original and intuitive account of how we perceive time which offers many alternative chronological considerations… amusing and erudite, fascinating and spirited. Bravo!..”
Peter Reading, The Times Literary Supplement

“…A wonderful, delightfully humourous polemic against everything that’s wrong with the way we deal with time today…”
The Independent, Books of the Year

“…An irresistibly provocative and political analysis of time... Her wittily enthusiastic thesis is that time has too long been used as a tool to power: as a manifesto, it could cause a revolution...”
Iain Finlayson, The Times, Books of the Year

“...A whirl of a book. Any page will get you hooked...”
New Scientist

“...Griffiths does not use the term capitalism to cast her slings and arrows, but her arguments are all in revolt against its strictures. If you want a riot of fun covering the historical and social aspects of time, this is the book to read...”
Socialist Review

“...Pip Pip is a brave and novel rage against the machine of time. It oozes ideas as rich as a literary death-by-chocolate. Savour a spoonful at a time and allow several months to digest...”
The Big Issue

With respect to Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton, 2007):

“...Wild is like nothing else I’ve ever read: thrilling, troubling, frightening, exhilarating. Jay Griffiths’ courage and energy are formidable, but so is her sheer intelligence and literary flair. This is a truly necessary book, and we are all lucky that the subject found a writer worthy of it...”
Philip Pullman

“...A major book by a woman who is, no question, a major writer…powerful and uncompromising… she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn’t there she simply births it… a majestic anthropology...”
Bill McKibben, The Ecologist

“...Jay Griffiths's Wild is part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original… Griffiths is fascinated by, and fascinating on, wild language, and her writing builds in extraordinary poetic sequences…. Indeed, of the many literary elements that make up the book - travelogue, memoir, journal, reportage, extended essay on feminism, sociology, anthropology, religion, ecology and geopolitics - it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work…Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work..."
Ian Beetlestone, The Observer

“...One of the greatest and most radical travel books of the past 20 years...”
The Age

“...Griffiths is primarily a storyteller… A bardic hymn to the necessity of the unfettered in envisioning possibility and change, Wild is radical in the original, etymological sense. It goes to the root of the problem and it sings its way there...”
Gareth Evans, Time Out “Book of the week”

"...Jay Griffiths is a five-star, card-carrying member of the hellfire club… a strange, utterly compelling book, Wild is easily the best, most rewarding travel book that I have read in the last decade. It is a bold rag-bag of a work, full of pagan energy, and at times richly beautiful...”
Mark Cocker, The Guardian

“...Dazzling gift and fascination for language ... this is a hungry, brave, all-consuming book, jumping with life, littered with perceptions and understandings, written by a woman who has engaged deeply with her subject and addressed it with warmth and vigour...”
Adam Nicolson, The Spectator

“...Insightful, effervescent and lavishly written…She shrouds her amazingly strenuous physical journey with a rich literary penumbra. The book has a profusion of historical allusions and a fertile bibliography; the vivid, excited writing draws haunting, lovely connections among multiple cultures, landscapes and ideas...”
Ruth Padel, The Washington Post

With respects to A Love Letter From a Stray Moon (Text publishing, Australia. Penguin e-book 2012. Go Together Press, forthcoming):

‘A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is a rich and extraordinary vision. It’s unrestrained; it’s as if Jay Griffiths had decided to put everything she knew and felt into this passionate poem of admiration and love for the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. There’s something entirely tropical about the uncompromising richness and intensity of the story, and yet it is a story, there is a strong narrative pulse. There are few people who can write stories like this, though. Jay Griffiths is a fearless adventurer with words and images. I salute her courage and the splendour of this vision.’ Philip Pullman

‘A Love Letter from a Stray Moon is an extraordinarily beautiful and sustained prose poem, a call for engagement with the world, and a powerful and astonishing feat of literary and retroactive telepathy. It is a book about possession, in many forms, each of which is sparked by a particular urgency; to comprehend, to celebrate, and to endure.’ Niall Griffiths

‘Frida Kahlo’s life and work were indivisible, and with a power worthy of her subject Jay Griffiths has found a way of writing Kahlo's broken, prolific life. Through Griffiths we hear the voice of Frida Kahlo herself, as if she were speaking directly to us. It’s like reading poetry inside a great biographical novel. I absolutely devoured this wonderfully perceptive and sensitive book. I already knew a lot about Frida Kahlo’s life but rediscovered it in these pages from the inside out.’ Marie Darrieussecq

‘I found in Griffiths writing a crafted freedom that feels made from the mist of dreams and a very real emerging dawn. Imagine being held in the open hand of moonlight and carried through a dream into day. This is what it is like to read A Love Letter from a Stray Moon. It is a book for men to read on women and for women to read on men. I am transported and transformed; I feel lucky to have read it and it leaves me in awe.’ Lemn Sissay

‘This novel is a love letter to human originality. Griffiths’ illumination of one unorthodox woman painter’s creative spirit allows the multiple seams of inspiration, fascination and necessity that trigger and propel our lives to glitter.’ Melanie Challenger

‘A fierce, compelling homage’ The Age, Australia

‘Kahlo’s inner voice soars on Griffiths’s metaphorical flourishes, applied carefully like the brushstrokes of Kahlo’s brightly pigmented self-portraits… a multilayered work which creates a vivid sense of Kahlo’s elliptical life… [Griffiths has] a formidable mind’ – The Sun-Herald, Australia

‘An interesting, enchanting author… the most beautiful, beautiful book’ – Phillip Adams Late Night Live, ABC

‘A rapturous, crazy and gorgeous poem to art and to the human spirit. It is a text that trembles and shudders with life and melds form with emotion in the most organic way… breathtaking in its tremulous beauty… a profound reflection on universal concerns… Griffiths’ novel itself reminds us what it is to be a human being, born native to the earth, on fire with the joy of the universe and full of grief for our broken world. It is a love song to life, to art and to the human spirit.’ – Alice Nelson, The West Australian

‘Griffiths has captured the intensity of a consuming passion in highly literary language that could plausibly be about the inner life of this extraordinary individual.’ – Theo Chapman, Sun-Herald

‘An act of poetic ventriloquy… Griffiths’s language is flowing, hyper-poetic’ – The Sydney Morning Herald


Selected Publications:
Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time (Flamingo, 1999)
Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton, 2007)
Anarchipelago (Wooden Books, 2007)
A Love Letter from a Stray Moon (Text Publishing, 2011. Penguin e-book 2012. Go Together Press, forthcoming)

Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton, 2007)

Wild: An Elemental Journey took seven years to research and write. It is an evocation of the songlines of the earth, the result of long journeys among Native people; meeting cannibals; anchoring a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; drinking shamanic medicine with Amazonian healers; visiting sea gypsies and journeying to the freedom fighters of West Papua. Griffiths is keenly interested in indigenous thought, and writes to challenge the intellectual apartheid of the dominant global culture. The book explores the words and meanings which shape ideas of wildness and argues that wild land is intrinsic to the health of the human mind. Above all the book is about the essential wildness of the human spirit.

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