The Deer Wedding launch

Penny Simpson's The Deer Wedding

was launched in Cardiff on Thursday 30 September at the Cameo Club, Pontcanna. The venue was extremely atmospheric, decorated, with serendipity, with a pair of antlers in the main room and a whole deer's head in the stairwell! Guests numbered over sixty, among them members of the arts, opera and theatre world as well as friends. The night was introduced by editor Gwen Davies, hosted by Penny, and featured the premier screening of an intriguing short flash trailer, The Deer Wedding View Flash Film Trailer

Actress Manon Edwards gave a superb reading of two parts of the text, in the diverse Croatian voices of twenty-something Dagmar on Hvar island, Dalmatia, 1998, and the youthful sculptor Antun in Split, 1934. The readings were linked by Penny setting the context of the novel's two main time periods, 1940s Croatia under foreign occupation, and late Nineties Zagreb and Dalmatia, just after civil war tore apart the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Penny described particularly vividly the way in which a chance visit in the Nineties as journalist to Hvar with theatre group ELAN led her to recreate that experience in fiction, using as her denoument the staging of The Tempest on the beach, among hotels populated with war refugees in the former tourist island paradise. Thanks were given to Danijela Spiric for guidance on Serbo-Croat pronunciation and spelling, to Manon, to Goldlion for the cover, and to DJ Evans for the film trailer. Plenty of books were signed afterwards and stamped enthusiastically by Penny with her special deer stamp. Bookmarks and deer stampings (if not deer sightings) available on request.

Back to News