I have been writing for Frost for so long I tend to assume everyone knows who I am, but common sense tells me that isn’t the case. Our readership is growing all the time, so many won’t have the first clue about why the Contributing Editor blathers on so endlessly about writing and books. And. this year, about Welsh writing in particular.
So the first thing you need to know is that I am Welsh. I was born in Cardiff and my formative years were spent in and around the city, although I left to go to college at eighteen and never lived there again. In modern parlance you would say that, despite living in England for so long, I ‘identify as’ Welsh and will do so until the day I die.
With my Dad at the launch of his first book
I was a teenager when I discovered there was a rich literary tradition on my doorstep. My father, Mercer Simpson, was a lecturer at the Polytechnic of Wales and worked with Tony Curtis, and I remember the great excitement in our household when Tony won the 1984 National Poetry Competition. By that time my father had retired and was spending his time reading for the Welsh Arts Council and editing the Welsh Academy of Literature’s magazine so the house was stuffed full of books by Welsh authors.
This may have been my literary heritage, but I eschewed literature, refusing to take english as an A-level. When I was a student Dad and I would debate whether there was such a thing as intrinsically ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the arts and could never see eye to eye, largely because I considered his views desperately old fashioned. Never an academic, my normal reading was romances, women’s fiction and historical sagas. In other words, popular fiction.
My father reviewed books endlessly and became an acknowledged expert on Anglo-Welsh literature. By the time he died in 2007 he’d had four of his own poetry collections published, the last of which he’d worked on during his final illness and his publisher brought the first copies to his funeral.
By then I had started writing too, experimenting with romantic fiction, something he barely understood, but my mother ploughed through my early stories and gave me both encouragement and useful feedback. Instead my father was really proud of the fact I freelanced as a cricket journalist. My mother’s bragging rights came a few years later when, in 2011, I reached the final of The Alan Titchmarsh Show’s People’s Novelist competition.
Mum and her Welsh flag
My mother loved reading but loathed formulaic romances, and her opinion has had more influence that anything over the way I write. I love a love story, but there has to be more. More for the reader to get their teeth into; a hint of mystery, research so good it teaches you something, a broadening of horizons. These are the stories I aim to write.
My career as a published author had a bit of a rocky start, but in 2018 I settled with Sapere Books, writing contemporary romances with a look over the shoulder at the past. The first two books were World War Two influenced, and later this year my debut dual timeline will be published by them, set in Cornwall in 1815 and 2015.
Last year I took another step forwards and signed a two book deal with One More Chapter, a division of Harper Collins. Both will be out this summer, written under the name of Eva Glyn. Eva for my paternal grandmother and Glyn for the Welsh novelist and poet Glyn Jones, a great friend to both of my parents and an emblem of my literary roots.
