Nativitas Christi / The Nativity – A New Cornish Mystery Play

by Alan M Kent

Paperback 124 pages
ISBN 978 1 903427 31 6

‘Kent has produced the most accessible and relevant poetry collections to have come from truly Cornish roots in years.’

The Western Morning News

The book

Following his acclaimed translation of the Cornish mystery play cycle, The Ordinalia, Alan M. Kent has written a new Nativity play with all the flavour of the medieval Celtic masterpiece but with a distinctive contemporary Cornish voice. In this book we find the familiar Nativity story with its cast of Shepherds, Wise Men, Herod, Mary, Joseph and the Christ child, along side Cornish sailors and tinners and Joseph of Arimathea and his legendary journey with Christ to Cornwall. Alan M. Kent’s interpretation of the Christmas story is more than just a reconstruction of a ‘missing’ text; it is powerful drama full of humour and wonder, while finely balancing new and traditional themes. A strikingly original work.

The author

Alan M. Kent was born in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1967. He is a prize-winning poet, novelist and dramatist and author and editor of a number of works on Cornish and Anglo-Cornish literature, including Looking at the Mermaid, a Reader in Cornish Literature 900–1900, two anthologies of Anglo-Cornish poetry, Voices from West Barbary and The Dreamt Sea, and an acclaimed translation of the Cornish Mystery play cycle, The Ordinalia. Two of his other plays are published by Francis Boutle Publishers: Oogly es Sin and The Tin Violin.