| Rhys Henry Hughes | |
|---|---|
Rhys Hughes |
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| Born | 24 September 1966 Cardiff, Wales |
| Occupation | Novelist, Short story writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Genres | Absurdism, Fantasy, OuLiPo, Science fiction |
Rhys Henry Hughes (born 24 September 1966), is a Welsh writer and essayist.
Born in Cardiff, Hughes is a prolific short story writer with an eclectic mix of influences, which include Italo Calvino, Milorad Pavić, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Flann O'Brien, Felipe Alfau, Donald Barthelme and Jack Vance. Much of his work is of a humorously eccentric bent, often parodies and pastiches with surreal and absurdist overtones, although he is by no means limited to any of these forms and has proven to be extremely versatile.[1] He has been published in Postscripts among many other places.
Although he is not a member of OuLiPo, the international literary group that uses mathematics and logic to create texts that break the familiar patterns of "normal" writing, he is one of the few English-speaking practitioners of these methods. For instance his novella 'Elusive Plato' was apparently written in the 'shape of a tesseract'. Some of his more experimental works can be considered examples of ergodic literature.[2]
His long novel Engelbrecht Again! is a sequel to Maurice Richardson's 1950 cult classic The Exploits of Engelbrecht and is the most radical of Hughes's books, making extensive use of lipograms, typographical tricks, coded passages and other OuLiPo techniques.[3]
His main project consists of authoring a 1,000-story cycle of both tightly and loosely interconnected tales. Hughes calls this grand cycle a "wheel", which in turn is formed by smaller "wheels within wheels".[4] In August 2011, Hughes wrote his 600th story. The linear sequence was disrupted when author Michael Bishop offered to write Hughes's 612th tale, a number picked at random. That story now serves as Bishop's introduction to Hughes's short novel The Crystal Cosmos.
As well as publishing books in English and having those works translated, Hughes has created books especially for foreign language publishers that will never exist in English. For instance, A Sereia de Curitiba will only exist in a Portuguese version,[5] and the Greek version of A New Universal History of Infamy is radically different from the English original.[6]
In 2005 his was the title story in The Minotaur in Pamplona, two chapbooks published by D-Press and edited by Neil Ayres. The collection also featured a poem by Brian Aldiss. He has had several short stories published in the Nemonymous anthologies.
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