The Dylan Thomas ‘Summer Soirées’ are a series of evening literary events co-organised by write4word and the School of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The events are supported by Literature Wales and run in parallel with the Dylan Thomas International Summer School. This is a residential creative writing programme for American MFA students directed by writers Pamela Petro and Dominic Williams. All events are free entry and open to the public and showcase some of Wales finest professional writers, many with international profiles, in a diverse range of genres. The ambition is to present these writers in informal intimate settings to both an international and an often-isolated rural local audience.

Menna Elfyn is an award winning poet, playwright. She has published fourteen collections of poetry, children’s novels, libretti for UK and US composers as well as plays for television and radio. Merch Perygl ( Danger’s Daughter),was published by Gomer Press in 2011, and her bilingual volume Murmur, Bloodaxe Books, in autumn 2012 was selected as Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, the first ever book in Welsh/ English to be chosen. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages for which she received an International Poetry Prize in Sardinia( 2009). In 2016, she published a biography Optimist Absoliwt of the Welsh woman poet Eluned Phillips which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year and the English translation launched in Washington DC in 2018.

In October 2017, she published a new bilingual collection of poetry Bondo by Bloodaxe Books which contains a sequence of poems about the Aberfan tragedy. Her literary memoir in Welsh, Cennad was published in March 2018. In 2019, she published Murmuri/ Murmur in Catalan with the poet/ translator Silvia Aymerich who came over to Wales to launch the book in the Senedd/ Welsh Parliament. In November 2019, she published a prose book on the theme of Sleep, ‘Cwsg’ by Gomer Press which contained short fiction and poetry. In 2022, she published ‘ Tosturi’ ( Mercy) a volume of poetry in Welsh.

She is Emerita Professor of Poetry at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David and President of Wales PEN Cymru. She has been a columnist with the national newspaper of Wales since 1994 and her work continues to be translated into various languages. ‘Bondo’ in Spanish will appear in 2020 from Trea publishers and translated by Eli Tolarextipi and an Italian translation of the same book will appear also this year in Sardinia with the translators Pino Serpillo and Luca Paci. Other book collections have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Lithuanian, as well as two volumes in Spanish, two in Italian and two in Basque.