Pugnacious Little Trolls by Rob Mimpriss

Pugnacious Little Trolls by Rob Mimpriss

'Where is the Welsh short story going? Wherever Rob Mimpriss takes it.' John O'Donoghue, laureate, MIND Book of the Year Award

In his first three short-story collections, Rob Mimpriss painstakingly mapped the hidden lives of country-dwellers in Wales. In Pugnacious Little Trolls, he combines the dark eloquence and surety of his earlier work with confident experimentation, in stories set among the bird-bodied harpies of Central America, among the dog-headed Cynocephali of Central America, and in the muddle of slag-heaps and job centres that H. G. Wells's Country of the Blind has become. In the three stories at the heart of the collection is Tanwen, idealistic and timid, confronting global warming and the rise of fascism as she embarks on her adult life.

Rob Mimpriss is the author of three short-story collections, Reasoning, For His Warriors and Prayer at the End, and the translator of Going South: The Stories of Richard Hughes Williams. His recent short fiction has been translated into Arabic by Hala Salah Eldin for an anthology of fiction published by Albawtaka, Cairo, and has been short-listed for the Rhys Davies Prize. He has published criticism and reviews of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Robert Olmstead and others for New Writing, New Welsh Review and elsewhere. In 2011 he was elected to Membership of the Welsh Academy, in recognition of his contributions to Welsh writing. He lives at http: //www.robmimpriss.com and in Bangor.