Dawn Morgan is a writer and artist living in the Gwendraith Valley in Carmarthenshire. She studied art and literature prior to a career in journalism, during which she worked for a range of magazines and newspapers and edited a series of travel guides.
Returning to poetry and painting in more recent years, she undertook an MA in Creative Writing at Lampeter in 2016. Her short fiction and poetry have been published by Accent Press, Writers Forum magazine, Paragram Poetry, and in the 2015 Flambard Poetry Prize anthology. Her first poetry pamphlet, Blood And Other Elements, was published in October 2018 by Rack Press.
As an artist, she had her first solo show at the Courtyard Gallery at Picton Castle in July 2018.
Mentoring
Dawn has experience of running creative writing workshops for all ages,. She has worked with local schoolchildren to develop their writing skills and runs private workshops for adults, focusing on helping writers to find their own voice. In addition, she provides online mentoring and feedback.
Publications
Ugly as Sin
(Pentad Books, 2020)
When George Orwell set down his six rules of writing in 1946, he began with the following advice:
‘Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’
In other words, avoid clichés – like the plague. But there’s another recommendation about creativity that flatly contradicts this notion. And that is, to be truly original you have to break some rules.
In this collection of short stories, five writers have actively embraced the colourful figures of speech in the English language and used them as springboards for the imagination.
Click here to read the whole preface on the Pentad Books website.
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Blood and Other Elements
(Rack Press 2018)
"Dawn Morgan’s empathies search out the viscera in a range of mostly historical narratives... there is a real imaginative thrust in Morgan’s poems.
Morgan has a very precise eye and the poems are filled with observed detail, such as this from ‘Hydrogen and Other Atoms’, in which mourning is evoked with deft, moving precision, ‘I didn’t clean for months / and he piled up: stardust and keratin. / I watched him fur the creases in the chairs, / bung up eye-holes, feed moulds that grew / new descendants from his cells.’ "
Ian Pople, The Manchester Review
Click here to read full review
The pamphlet is for sale online from the Poetry Book Society and Waterstones.
Unforgotten
(Accent Press 2014)
The short story 'Mons Avenue', written under her maiden name, Dawn Smith, was included in this award-winning anthology.
"Mons Avenue. All the streets round the old barracks are named after battles, like Marne, Somme, Arnhem - and Mons. Mr Stevens at number 10 told me he fought in one.
'I'm living in the wrong road,' he said. 'Here I am in Mons Avenue, but by rights I should be round the corner in Anzio Crescent. I don't suppose the council would move me, eh?' He sometimes chats when I take round his Evening Echo. He hasn't got a wife, and his dog died. He put a sign in his window this year that says 'Lest We Forget'. I thought he meant his dog at first..."
Click here to read more of the story
Click here to purchase book on Amazon
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