Rhys Hughes

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. 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.

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.

His main project consists of authoring a 1,000-story cycle of both tightly and loosely interconnected tales. Hughes calls this grand cycle a...
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