collaboration

Announcement: A New Collaboration for Wales Arts Review

A few weeks back we launched our Substack page, the new home of the Wales Arts Review weekly newsletter. Now Wales Arts Review is delighted to build on that by announcing a collaboration with The Western Mail, Wales’s only national newspaper, featuring an exciting new essay series focussing on a diverse range of subjects all connected to the arts and culture of Wales from some of the top writers in the country. Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing these essays simultaneously in Wales Arts Review and The Western Mail Weekend Magazine, from contributors including Fflur Dafydd, Jonathan Edwards, Andrew Ogun, Rachel Trezise and many more.

The essays will be featured as part of Wales Arts Review’s new subscribers’ Substack page, Wales Arts Review Plus. All our regular features, reviews, news and interviews will remain free to read on the main Wales Arts Review site, with the Substack subscription service offering additional content, including the new essay series, featured interviews, and regular specials, for just £5 a month (or £50 a year).

Details of how to sign up to the new subscription service are available here, on the Wales Arts Review Substack page.

The first article in the new series, written by award-winning poet Jonathan Edwards, will be published in Wales Arts Review Plus and The Western Mail on Saturday April 8th.

Wales Arts Review editor Dr Emma Schofield said, “The opportunity to build new connections within the arts and cultural sector within Wales is always an exciting moment and I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve been able to launch this new collaboration with The Western Mail. The new essay series, combined with the additional content on the Wales Arts Review Plus page, will provide an opportunity for us to extend our support for high-quality, topical and informed discussion about Wales, the arts and our sense of national and cultural identity.

As we continue to drive Wales Arts Review forward into this next chapter, I look forward to working with writers and artists who share our vision of raising the profile of critical debate within Wales and to providing exciting new content both on the main site, and within our subscription service.” 

Wales Arts Review founder and executive editor Gary Raymond said, “In its eleven years, Wales Arts Review has worked tirelessly to improve the level of cultural debate going on in Wales, and that has included a long term dedication to professional development of what we might term cultural critics, writers, and commentators. We have always worked way above and beyond what our meagre budgets have allowed, publishing over 5,000 articles in our first 10 years. This new collaboration with The Western Mail is a welcomed step toward our founding ambition of reinvigorating the profile of the critical arts in Wales. Working closely with the team there we will be able to plug in to the history and culture of Wales’ only national newspaper and usher in a new era in how Wales gets to talk about itself.

“When I wrote the article ‘How Welsh Writers Can Help Redefine Wales’ for Wales Arts Review in July 2022, a collaboration like the one with The Western Mail would have represented a significant moment of progress. I now see it as the first step into the foothills of what can be achieved when the right people have the will to make change.

Wales Arts Review Plus not only gives us the opportunity to commission the best writers in Wales to write about Welsh arts and culture, but it moves us ever closer to that Holy Grail set out in our mission statement. By subscribing to the new Wales Arts Review Plus or buying, you will be supporting the work of Wales Arts Review, its writers, and the writers of Wales, as well as getting access to a whole new area of debate and comment.”

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