Author shortlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times Short Story Award
2012.
In Albania, Mexico, China, Iraq, Israel, Wales, the US, London... people
are on the move. Migration and immigration are key issues of the
twentieth and twenty-first century. The Keys of Babylon is a
collection of 15 linked stories by award-winning poet and author Robert
Minhinnick, giving voices to migrants around the globe.
These stories of migration reflect a comprehensive mix of hope, success,
failure, fear, indifference and passion. Finally, the stories of each of
the main characters come together in the closing narrative, surveying
their circumstances on one particular day.
Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952, and now lives in Porthcawl,
south Wales. He has twice won the Forward Prize for Best Individual
Poem, as well as the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 2006 for
his collections of essays Watching the Fire Eater (Seren, 1995) and
To Babel and Back (Seren, 2005). His first novel, Sea Holly (Seren,
2007), was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.