Thomas Morris is a Welsh writer and editor. He was born and raised in Caerphilly and was educated in the Welsh language all through primary and secondary school. He worked for Welsh TV channel S4C for a period [1] and was a trialist for Cardiff City F.C.. [2] He then moved to Ireland where he studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, where he became chairperson of the Literary Society. [3] During this time he became friends with, and an early editor of, Sally Rooney [4] who described him as "the source of all her good writing advice". [5] He is also a graduate of the University of East Anglia's MA in creative writing programme. [1] Writing [ edit ] Morris was drawn to explorations of the interior life, by writers such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector.

A beautiful collection of five short stories that invoke an entire range of emotions in a dazzling, highly conceptual and striking way. Little Wizard” is the second shortest story but is a gem - a short, office worker struggles existentially and reaches out to a girl who has been his lifelong friend, deciding for once to take a risk. BP: And they fit into this current fashion for stories of masculinity now , which are often about men having feelings, and the stories often precariously recycle the language of therapy. You steer clear of all that, however. In Wales, in the short opening story, Gareth is taken by his father to an international friendly match. His parents have split up and the threat of the repo man hangs over his home, so the young boy makes cosmic bargains. If his dad doesn’t come in, Wales will win. If Wales win, the house won’t be repossessed.

Featured Reviews

In Joy Williams’s stories, sentences are incantations that pull characters across the stage, momentarily illuminating their troubled, hidden selves. The language skims away the shell of the self, so that we’re left to view those troubled parts we often try to protect and disavow: the gooey yolks which can be so frightening, perplexing, but in their own way also beautiful, and oddly human.

Thomas Morris is incredibly gifted within the form. It's so heartening to read his work.' SARAH HALLThe ironically named Big Mike in ‘Little Wizard’ has been consistently overlooked, due to his short height, his whole life – by his boss, football scouts, and potential romantic partners. His lifelong best friend, Rhian, knows all his secrets and desires except one – he loves her. In a heartachingly honest portrait of one lonely man’s evening, Morris leaves the story with Big Mike finally finding courage, finally taking a risk. The psychological impact of early losses is a recurring theme, the elusive quest for identity in adulthood that seems nebulously tied to the past. Little Wizard explores this to great effect with an unreliable narrator, Big Mike, whose feelings for his schoolfriend Rhian form the surface part of a story with darker depths, a sense of menace that is underpinned, once again, by self-loathing and loneliness: “Whoever this person was, whoever had been going around pretending to be him, they were pathetic. He took a photo, to catch the imposter off-guard.” Well, have a good time, she says. And make sure you get something to eat. I’ve told your father, but you know what he’s like. Morris had been faithfully trying to create a novel, wedded to a process that was “very literary and painful”, when he started to cheat on it, fooling around with some seahorses. This writing project was just a bit of fun, without the weight of knowing what it was about, but suddenly there was life to it; he had characters talking to each other. “It’s the same lesson I keep learning,” he says. “If I decide ahead of time what I’m going to do, it dies. The writing has to catch me off guard. Had I known I was going to spend two years writing a 15,000-word novella about seahorses, I might not have written it,” he says, laughing. Barry Pierce: I just have to get it out of the way immediately. I think Aberkariad is one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read. Where did the idea of the story come from?