When Jonathan Edwards was a schoolboy in south Wales, his primary teacher dressed the class in rags, smeared dirt on their faces, and took them on a re-enactment of the Chartist march of 1839. The Newport Rising began at the Welsh Oak pub in Pontymister and ended when 22 protesters, marching for the right to vote, were shot.
“Looking back, I think that was a really important day,” says Edwards, 35 and a teacher himself. He included a poem about Newport’s Chartist mural in his first book. The mural was controversially demolished in 2013 but the book won this month’s Costa poetry award. On 27 January Edwards will learn whether he has beaten the favourite, novelist Ali Smith, to the overall prize for book of the year.
Working-class dissent was a big thing for me when I was growing up. In the valleys you’re steeped in it
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