News of the World

To Aran, I tells how a young man from north Wales found the means to give shape a youthful dream of going to live on Inis Mr, an adventure recorded in his acclaimed first memoir An Aran Keening. This beautiful, high-spirited story blends moments of high farce, poetry and serious social observation, as the young McNeillie a self-described quare fellow pursues his dream with a kind of fatalistic abandonment. Down but not quite out, he works his way towards Aran - first as a local news reporter on 5 a week in mining towns and villages in the Amman Valley in Wales. From there, he washes up in a condemned property at Waterloo on the Mersey shore in outer Liverpool and finally, aged twenty-one, finds himself in central London and the BBCs Radio Newsroom at Broadcasting House. After amassing enough money to keep him afloat on Inis Mr for a year, he sets out and, at the end of October 1968, he waved goodbye to a highly promising career, his colleagues, friends and even to his future wife: all to fulfil a dream he had when sixteen, first looking into J.M. Synges The Aran Islands, as if it was Chapmans Homer and he John Keats.