**  The First Wife's Tale  was long-listed
for the Wales Book of the Year 2007  **

I went to grammar school in Hastings in eleven-plus days, studied English at New Hall, Cambridge, and got a doctorate for my thesis on Thomas Hardy’s novels.    After that I taught adult students for the Open University and the W.E.A., living for several years near Cranfield University where my husband worked as a physicist.    There was not much going on in the arts world, so I and some friends founded The Interpreter’s House magazine to encourage creative writing in Bedfordshire.   Now it’s a national journal approaching its tenth birthday, and we have moved to Oxford.  I am still the sole editor, and I also edit the newsletter of the Wilfred Owen Association, having a great interest in the poets of the First World War.   

For some time I was more used to writing criticism than poetry and my books include Six Women Novelists (Macmillan 1987), Preface to Hardy (Macmillan 1993) and Wilfred Owen (Seren 1993).  I’ve also published translations of the Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (Bloodaxe 1992), a semi-serious novel, The Chalet Girls Grow Up (Plas Gwyn Books 1998), and a continuation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons (Pen Press 2005).

My first collection, The Sun's Yellow Eye, was published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1997, followed by The Latin Master's Story, Rockingham, 2000, and in 2006, Shoestring Press published my 3rd collection The First Wife's Tale.

The Georgians 1901-1930, An Anthology, (2009, Shoestring Press, ed Merryn Williams) is the first anthology of its kind since  James Reeves’ slender Georgian Poetry, published by Penguin in 1962, and includes a substantial Introduction as well as explanatory notes and biographical information about the 24 poets included:  

Lascelles Abercrombie, Ferenc Bekassy, Edmund Blunden,
Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton, W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, James Elroy Flecker, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Francis Ledwidge, D.H. Lawrence, John Masefield, Charlotte Mew, Harold Monro, Wilfred Owen,
Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley, J.C. Squire, Edward Thomas and T.P. Cameron Wilson.

This is one of the most ambitious enterprises undertaken by Shoestring Press in its fifteen year history.

e-mail Merryn

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collection -
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Shoestring Press;

"The Latin Master's Story"
Rockingham.

anthology -
"The Georgians", Shoestring Press

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