My love - all Love excels

Norena Shopland specialises in diverse history with books includingForbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales which celebrates Welsh LGBTQ+ history, and A History of Women in Men’s Clothes: from cross-dressing to empowerment. In 2021 the Welsh Government commissioned Shopland to deliver LGBTQ+ training to local Welsh libraries, museums, and archives.An offshoot was the Welsh County LGBTQ+ Timeline Collection, the only country in the world to have this kind of detailed local history. Shopland has a monthly column for Nation.Cymru on Welsh history.

Katherine Philips: the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century poet writing about love, society and relationships during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War. But as with many early women writers, she has been largely forgotten by historians, and she slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664.She lived in violent times; a Royalist while her husband was a Parliamentarian. With the restoration of the monarchy she faced a choice, leave him to his fate or save him. Yet it is her love for two Welsh women that dominated Katherine’s life, and these relationships were writ large in her poems to the point where scandal, detailed for the first time in this book, threatened to destroy her reputation.My Love All Love Excels is an extraordinary account of a remarkable writer who was deeply passionate, complex and loyal. A woman who lived life on her own terms.