About Caterwen Press
Caterwen is a private literary press I revived in 2021 with the aim of producing a variety of exercises in both content and medium.
The press was originally created by my father Arfon Rees in 2001. Through it he published his book Welsh Outlaws and Bandits: Political Rebellion and Lawlessness in Wales, 1440-1603, as a well as an additional supplement to the book in 2016. “Caterwen” is an archaic Welsh word for “great oak,” but it was also used to refer to a nobleman or the mistress of a house. It recurs in its various meanings across several poems written by the fifteenth-century Welsh bard Guto’r Glyn, on whom my father published a biography in 2008.
Arfon Rees died in 2019, before I could ask him why he’d settled on that particular name for his private press. I see this project as a way of carrying on something he began, while also pushing myself to explore new creative directions.
All works created by Caterwen Press are available to read online.
The press was originally created by my father Arfon Rees in 2001. Through it he published his book Welsh Outlaws and Bandits: Political Rebellion and Lawlessness in Wales, 1440-1603, as a well as an additional supplement to the book in 2016. “Caterwen” is an archaic Welsh word for “great oak,” but it was also used to refer to a nobleman or the mistress of a house. It recurs in its various meanings across several poems written by the fifteenth-century Welsh bard Guto’r Glyn, on whom my father published a biography in 2008.
Arfon Rees died in 2019, before I could ask him why he’d settled on that particular name for his private press. I see this project as a way of carrying on something he began, while also pushing myself to explore new creative directions.
All works created by Caterwen Press are available to read online.