Pamela Petro in Conversation at Waterstones Llandudno

We are delighted to welcome bestselling author Pamela Petro who joins us to discuss her beautifully haunting memoir “The Long Field”.

“The Long Field” burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer’s life. Pamela Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means “long field,” but is also more than the English approximation of “homesickness.” It’s a name for the bone-deep longing felt for someone or something–a home, culture, language, a younger self–that you’ve lost or left behind. Hiraeth is embodied by Arthur, King of the Once and Future, but never the Present. It is, above all, an acknowledgement of the presence of absence in our lives.