Letters from the Prestwich Mental Hospital

Letters From The Prestwich Mental Hospital is Robin Turner's attempt to unpick and understand the story of his mother, Mark E Smith and Arthur Machen.



Taking the contents of correspondence between Mark E Smith and his mother as a starting point and utilising interviews with Rita Tait, of Abergavenny, South Wales (the author's mother) as a sounding board, Letters From The Prestwich Mental Hospital will retrace paths revealed in names, places and dates scribed in the letters and will revisit encounters between Smith and his mum at Machen events.

  

It will attempt to fill in the many gaps in the logic of Robin's mum's hidden relationship with one of this country's most stubbornly original artists, and her relationship with the cast of supporting players from the worlds of literature, the arts and the antiquarian book trade that made up the rest of his mother's secret society - a society that enabled a bored housewife from Newport to bring an out of print, obscure Welsh author (Arthur Machen) back from the dead.