Turning Tides

TURNING TIDES Contemporary writing from Wales

Essays by Robert Minhinnick

Contemporary writing from Wales

Llenyddiaeth cyfoes o Gymru

Published by Wales Arts International and Welsh Literature Abroad, 2004

Cyhoeddwyd gan Celfyddydau Rhyngwladol Cymru a Llenyddiaeth Cymru Dramor, 2004

Edited by Sioned Puw Rowlands of Welsh Literature Abroad Essays by Robert Minhinnick Photography by Toril Brancher Designed by seven www.sevencreative.co.uk With thanks to Diarmuid Johnson ISBN 0-9545130-3-7 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

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Golygwyd gan Sioned Puw Rowlands, Llenyddiaeth Cymru Dramor Ysgrifau gan Robert Minhinnick Lluniau gan Toril Brancher Dyluniwyd gan seven www.sevencreative.co.uk Gyda diolch i Diarmuid Johnson ISBN 0-9545130-3-7 Cedwir pob hawl. Oni bai am ddyfynnu darnau byr at ddibenion beirniadaeth neu adolygu, ni chaniateir atgynhyrchu unrhyw ran o’r cyhoeddiad hwn na’i gadw mewn cyfundrefn adferadwy na’i drosglwyddo mewn unrhyw ddull na thrwy unrhyw gyfrwng heb ganiatâd ymlaen llaw gan ddeiliaid yr hawlfraint.

Celfyddydau Rhyngwladol Cymru 28 Heol y Parc Caerdydd CF10 3QE Cymru Ff +44 (0)29 2038 3037 Ff +44 (0)29 2039 8778 www.wai.org.uk info@wai.org.uk Mae Celfyddydau Rhyngwladol Cymru yn bartneriaeth rhwng Cyngor Celfyddydau Cymru a Chyngor Prydeinig Cymru Mae Cyngor Celfyddydau Cymru yn Gorff Cyhoeddus a Noddir gan Lywodraeth Cynulliad Cymru Llenyddiaeth Cymru Dramor Canolfan Mercator Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth SY23 1NN Cymru Ff +44 (0)1970 622 544 Ff +44 (0)1970 621 524 www.welsh-lit-abroad.org llcd-wla@llcd-wla.org

CONTENTS

04 Foreword Welsh Literature Abroad & Wales Arts International

07 Introduction Robert Minhinnick

13 Prism Sentences Recent Welsh-language Fiction

23 Mapping the Dark Recent English-language Fiction

37 A Live Tradition Recent Welsh-language Poetry

49 A Teeming World Recent English-language Poetry

63 Appendix Rights Publishers Literary Magazines Organisations

04

FOREWORD

Y Drych

The Mirror

Deëllais yn ifanc am fodolaeth dau fyd , ac yng nghanol fy mhrifio rown yn farus i fod

I learned very early that there were two worlds and when I was young I was greedy to be

y tu hwnt i fy hafau ac yng ngerddi’r drych.

Yno, pe gwyddech sut oedd edrych , roedd yr haul yn deilchion wrth droed y ffawydd a rhyw drymder diamser yn nyfroedd y dydd;

beyond my summers, in the mirror’s lawns.

There, if you had the knowledge to see,

gwahoddai’r cysgodion y gwyliwr i blith eu byd anorganig, lle disgleiriai’r gwlith

Shadows seduced the watcher into a mineral garden where the dew

yn ddiemwntau ar fetel y dail.

Chwyswn ac yswn am gael gadael

glistened like diamonds on metal trees.

I burned, I yearned to be able to leave

y goleuni gorysgafn i fod yn rhan o’r byd y tu hwnt i rimyn arian

my vapid days in order to live in the vivid world beyond the mirror’s rim,

y gwydr, lle ni chlywid syrffed y cloc yn pwnio’r oriau’n ddiwrnodau llac. , Roedd yr ardd yn fwy llachar na’m bywyd fy hun – man llonydd, man lledrith, man ar wahân,

away from the tedium mapped out by the clock which ticked out vast wastes on its pointless walk.

lloches dirgelion, lle plethai’r dellt gysgodlen i guddio presenoldeb gwyllt

a den of secrets, where intricate trees wore veils of ivies, creepers and weeds

y prysgwydd a ffroenai’r gwydr main a’n gwahanai. Ambell brynhawn,

which, rampant, searching, scratched at the glass that thinly divided us. Some afternoons

a minnau’n hiraethu’n fwy na’r arfer, tawelwn a theimlwn am ennyd fer

so strong was my longing that I thought I could feel – forgetting my body and standing quite still –

feddyliau eraill, yn gywreinrwydd i gyd, wedi cael cip rhyfeddol ar fyd

the pressure of curious minds that had caught a glimpse of another world and sought

y tu hwnt i ddryswch afreal y gwrych ac anadlu dieithr yn cymylu’r drych.

to know it, pressing against the mirror’s screen, their hot breaths clouding its silver sheen.

Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth Lewis

From the sequence Cyfannu published in Cyfrif Un ac Un yn Dri, Gwyneth Lewis (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 1996)

From the sequence Cyfannu (Wholeness), translated by the author, and first published in English translation in Modern Poetry in Translation, No.7, Spring 1995.

the sun lay in shards at the beech’s foot while the light was heavy with water’s weight.

The garden was brighter than my infant life – a place apart, it was a magic grove,

Could it be that Gwyneth Lewis’s poem is alluding to the experience of growing up with more than one language, the fascination of having at least one alternative for each object and experience? In this respect, Wales’s two languages, Welsh and English, bring us closer to the rest of the world, where societies which negotiate between more than one language are the norm. This has also created a linguistic and cultural fault line, generating friction which continues to be remarkably productive, driving much of our contemporary literature.

In this snapshot of contemporary Welsh writing considered by Robert Minhinnick, one of the British Isles’ most important contemporary poets, you will grasp that drive to create, which has produced a variety of fictional worlds. Much of the work discussed is already published in translation across the world, through translation subsidies to foreign publishers from Welsh Literature Abroad. This volume is not, however, an attempt to create a comprehensive picture of the contemporary literary scene in Wales; it offers a view from the tip of an iceberg which, once probed, reveals astoundingly resonant literary depths, for the Welsh literary tradition has been continuous since the sixth century.

Producing this publication enabled us to commission photographer Toril Brancher to take portraits of the writers and photographs of Wales’s vital landscape in which they work. Toril has captured something of the character of all and we are grateful to her for her care.

Realised through the collaboration of Welsh Literature Abroad with Wales Arts International, this publication has been achievable with the support of British Council Wales and the Arts Council of Wales. None of it would have been possible, of course, without the writers themselves, several of whom are established names on the international scene and may already be known to you.

Our thanks to all.

We look forward to inspiring you further in your discovery of contemporary writing from Wales.

Sioned Puw Rowlands

Ceri Jones

Welsh Literature Abroad

Wales Arts International

07 INTRODUCTION

09

I was brought up in a politically concerned household in which an ‘independent Wales’ was never considered a possibility.

Family members spoke some Welsh, everyone learned Welsh in school, but there could only be one language of artistic expression – English.

For me, as a teenager, Pink Floyd playing ‘Astronomy Domine’ at Bridgend’s Kee Club, and the visit of the Beatles to Bangor, both in 1967, were far more significant, for example, than the investiture of Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son as ‘Prince of Wales’ in 1969. (The Beatles in Bangor was the first occasion I realised there was a ‘north’, i.e. a ‘different’ Wales. My mother at 78 has never been to that different Wales, only 120 miles away.)

But, with exceptions such as the poetry magazine Second Aeon, the revolutions supposedly brought about by pop culture were slow to appear in Welsh literatures.

Indeed, the post-War but pre- ‘liberation’ period continued longer in Wales than most places. For some, it was an eternity. Duncan Bush brilliantly invokes the mood in his collection, Midway (1998), which also deals with some of the ‘multiple-personality’ dilemmas urban/rural, north/south, monolingual/bilingual and class issues of being Welsh.

Robert Minhinnick, Porthcawl 2004

Bush was born in the Welsh capital, Cardiff, which he reminds us, had once the brief, delusory importance of being the second maritime city in the world after New York, at least in the tangible terms of export tonnage.

He adds: ‘In any event, the language of this international cosmopolitanism was English - not for its Englishness, but its universality. Welsh, by contrast, was the language of backwardness and parochialism. It was the image of benighted forefathers; a tongue only rural ignoramuses still spoke.

The soft, high-pitched Welsh accent itself was a matter of scorn for those who had acquired the harder-edged, nasal, cynical speech of the ports - of Cardiff, Newport and Barry.

Even adjectivally, ‘Welsh’ was a term of opprobrium: it designated the hinterland, where the ‘Shonnies’, ‘Boyos’ and ‘Sheep-shaggers’ lived. To this view, Cardiff and its immediate purlieus resembled a city-state, like Thebes or Sparta.

Outside it lay ‘Wales’, a land of vague, envious paravails, who lived on mountainsides or huddled at their foot in strings of dirty villages...’

For their part, Welsh speakers found Cardiff remote and provincial. It was no capital for them. Liverpool was friendlier, and certainly, until the 1960s, more Welsh. As for industrial Wales, it was inhabited by a hapless and deracinated proletariat at the mercy of boom and bust, victims of mining disasters and economic cataclysms such as the 1930s’ Depression.

Yma bu unwaith Gymru, ac yn awr Adfeilion sinemâu a glaw ar dipiau di-dwf...

‘Y Dilyw, 1939’, Byd a’r Betws (1941)

What’s nowadays a desert of cinemas, Rain over disused tips, this once was Wales.

Saunders Lewis, ‘The Deluge, 1939’, Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967), trans. Anthony Conran

Welsh speakers saw English monoglots as being deprived of one of their birthrights. Both pity and scorn helped form their view of this majority. Poet, Bobi Jones, speaks for many in asserting that knowledge of Welsh is an essential part of ‘a basic civilised education’. Bilingualism for Welsh people ensures confidence in identity and interest ‘in the roots of one’s own country, its recent society, the explanation of so much in the national psyche and history, the environment of places and their names’. Such knowledge helps people resist ‘the pressures of uniformity that prevent [the] understanding [of the] multiform international world of relationships’.

Compounding these internal misreadings has been the lack of adequate translation of literature from ‘Cymraeg’ into English. Too often translation has been seen as a dutiful process rather than a creative delight. With honourable exceptions, such as Anthony Conran’s Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967), now available as Welsh Verse (1986; 2003) from Seren, very little has appeared in translation, until recently, that made English-only readers sit up and take notice. This situation is gradually changing, however. A recent event was the appearance of The Bloodaxe Book of Modern

Welsh Poetry (2003) which seeks to represent in English the highlights of the twentieth-century’s Welsh poetry.

It is thus from real tragedies of cultural incomprehension that Wales has sought to emerge since the 1960’s. The catalyst for newfound tolerance and self-awareness was inevitably, if ironically, globalisation. Yet with this have come the interruption of rural and industrial continuities, family and neighbourhood solidarity, and the transformation of Welsh speaking Wales into what is in danger of becoming a series of pockets and enclaves threatened with inundation.

Despite globalisation, Welsh language writers remain intimately in touch with their roots. Strictmetre poetry, for example, with its unique sonic rules, some of them fifteen hundred years old, does not merely offer writing opportunities.

For some, it confers spiritual value and is proof of irreducible national distinctiveness. And nothing is ruled out, with poetry written to rules of strict metre just as frequently heard chanted over a trip-hop beat.

In literary terms Wales has been famous for the legend of Dylan Thomas – the hard-drinking poet who toured the USA like a rock star and was due to work with Stravinsky, but died in New York in 1953,

aged 39. Some readers will know the flinty parables of R.S. Thomas, whose poetry flourished later in the century. As for writers in the Welsh language, many remain a mystery, although this is gradually changing through the work of Welsh Literature Abroad, an agency established in 2000 to facilitate translation of Welsh literatures worldwide.

But what is ‘Wales’? The momentous year in recent Welsh history was 1997. By a tiny majority, its people voted for the establishment of a ‘National Assembly’. That majority agreed to devolution of political power from the UK and London, to Wales. For some amongst them it is the first step towards an independent Welsh state - an entity that has never existed.

Wales today is officially a bilingual country with a population of some three million which covers an area of 21,000 square kilometres. Its population density is half that of the UK average. One of its chief glories is its coastline, 1200 kilometres long. As to its landscape, no other European country of its size can match its variety. Everyone speaks English, whilst 21% of the population also speak Welsh, many as a first language, a Celtic language unrelated to English.

Though these statistics indicate that Welsh language writers might be handicapped, the irony is that because of subsidised media, and the loyalty of the Welsh market, they might be better read in their communities than English language writers in theirs. Indeed, for a host

of reasons, artistic activity amongst Welsh speakers seems more intense.

But who are the Welsh? This is a difficult question. The following statistics may bring us closer to the answer.

The most ‘Welsh’ areas of Wales are the county boroughs of Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil in the south. Here, 92% of the population were born in Wales. Over 85% of these people identify themselves as ‘Welsh’. A maximum of 10% speak Welsh. But things are really more complicated. The identity of these people has a devious, yet brilliant, duality. They are ‘British’ or ‘Welsh’ when it suits them. But to be defined as ‘English’ would be an outrage.

In reality, these people ghost in and out of identity, always one step ahead of the demographers who seek to define and therefore diminish them. Meanwhile, the county with the highest proportion of Welsh speakers is Gwynedd. Here, 69% are bilingual. Yet only 70% of people from Gwynedd were born in Wales, and only 71% classify themselves as ‘Welsh’ in this linguistic redoubt.

As to that 1969 Investiture, it attracted violent protests because it symbolised subjection. But like other royal occasions - the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, her Golden Jubilee in 2002 - it was also an opportunity for the working class to wave Union Jacks and dragon flags and organise street parties. Politics here are nothing if not complex.

With the exceptions of the south Wales seaports, Wales is remarkably homogeneous. Most in-migration is from England. Yet what stands out is the contribution made by descendants of Italian, Chinese and Bangladeshi migrants. As for writers, a surprisingly high proportion of English language authors were either brought up or now live outside Wales. This has broadened the question of whether a distinctively ‘Welsh’ literature can be produced in the English language. Yet no matter how literature in Wales is defined, today it certainly exists in a greater variety than ever before.

Robert Minhinnick

13 PRISM SENTENCES Recent Welsh-language Fiction

Profiles 15 Robin Llywelyn 16 Wiliam Owen Roberts 18 Angharad Tomos 19 Angharad Price 20 Martin Davis 21 Mihangel Morgan

15 Gwlad fawr ydi Haf heb Haul, anfarth ddeudwn i. Maen nhw’n deud nad oes ganddi ddim ffiniau ond choelia’i fawr. Rhaid i wlad gael ffiniau ne tydi hi ddim yn wlad, siwˆr.

Robin Llywelyn, Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background, 1992)

Sunless summer is a big country, vast I reckon. Some say it has no borders but I don’t believe it. A country must stop somewhere or it can’t be whole, surely?

Robin Llywelyn, White Star (2004), trans. by the author with Gwen Davies

In the hands of Wiliam Owen Roberts and Robin Llywelyn the Welsh novel becomes universal in its scope.

Their work, which departs from the convention of realism, has a vivacity of ambition which oxygenates the language and revolutionises our expectations of the Welsh novel.

Influences on Roberts and Llywelyn include Umberto Eco and Boccacio, the Latin American magic realists and medieval romance.

Wiliam Owen Roberts’s Y Pla (Pestilence, 1997) is set in the fourteenth century at the height of the Black Death - contemporary with Chaucer in England and Dafydd ap Gwilym in Wales. The tale unfolds in Cairo, Florence and Wales, combining medieval ribaldry with stand-up comedy: Wrthi yn bwchio ei afr ar b’nawn diffaith rhywdro yn Rhagfyr, 1347 oedd Einion Fychan, y gwahanglwyf.

Y Pla (Pestilence, 1987)

It was a dreary afternoon in late December, and Einion Fychan the leper was fucking his goat.

Pestilence (1991), trans. Elisabeth Roberts

The cast we encounter include a half-wit, a fasting woman, a drunken poet and a lascivious priest: Mae chwant y cnawd yn drech na fi.

Lust of the flesh is too strong for me!

There are stock situations such as the pratfall into slime: Rhedodd i fyny’r stryd yn hollol noeth, heblaw am fodrwy ar ei fys, ac yn hynod ddrewllyd gan adael hwrli bwrli mawr y tu cefn iddo.

Stark naked, stinking like a midden, he fled, leaving pandemonium.

But the effect is comic rather than simply funny. By the use of these familiar tableaux, Roberts acknowledges the provenance of his material. The epidemic itself is a powerful metaphor for the subversion of orthodoxy as much as the ravaging of populations.

The plague clears the way for the Renaissance: The pestilence has changed all that! It’s changed everything…

The pestilence made us rise above ourselves, see ourselves in a new way.

(From the ending of the English translation of Pestilence (1991), where the Welsh original has been changed by the author. The sentence does not appear in the original).

Serfs will no longer be serfs. The feudal mind is set to be liberated.

The anthropocentric world is imminent. The plague may be a metaphor for capitalism, or perhaps for post-modernism. This being Wales, perhaps Wiliam Owen Roberts’s Black Death is the threat of language extinction, a ‘linguistic equivalent of AIDS…a killer virus spreading universally…’ in the words

of poet and novelist Duncan Bush.

Yet perhaps only in a culture in crisis is the artist able to rise above himself, to escape duty, to fulfil a destiny.

Roberts seems a long way from our English-language writers.

Comparison is possible only with Griffri (1991), Christopher Meredith’s second novel set in the twelfth century but in the same locality as his modern work. Unlike Y Pla, there is nothing picaresque about Griffri.

Two things form the basis of the book: its realism and the inner life of its hero-survivor.

The characters in Y Pla are denied such inner lives. Their function is to challenge, to amuse, to weave themselves into the tale’s brocade.

When the story’s finished, so too are they. But what they will have illustrated is the need and desire for change. For all its playfulness, the novel describes a world undergoing seismic alteration. Out of this social breakdown comes creative ferment.

Certain plagues are necessary. In the novel, a newcomer represents challenge and opportunity, bringing with him the life-changing spores of a different knowledge: nothing could be more pertinent today.

No two recent Welsh-language novels have perplexed readers as much as Robin Llywelyn’s Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background, 1992) and O’r Harbwr Gwag i’r Cefnfor Gwyn (From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, 1994). History is rewritten here and the future prophesied. Both books are influenced by science-fiction and by myth, in particular, the imagery of transformation, and can be read as allegories of communication.

References to technological communication are frequent in Llywelyn’s work. And in a world where such communication is an ever-increasing electronic blizzard, ‘meaning’ itself becomes meaninglessness. Anything can happen and if it does, so what?

Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn is built around three ‘testimonies’ written down by three characters on computer disks. These find their way somehow into the archive of the totalitarian city of Entwürdigung, and are toyed with on screen by a worker, Zählappell, who sleeps fitfully - does he dream? - as the stories appear on screen.

There is a tremendous amount of movement in these works. Even when travelling through what looks like their own country, Llywelyn’s main characters are pilgrims or refugees.

This theme of displacement is crucial. It stresses alienation while gently exploring loss. But it is also a subtle satire of ambition. What destination if any are the characters in Seren Wen bound for?

Des i ddim allan lle o’n i fod ond pasio heibio ymlaen i’r nos, heibio llefydd na welis i mo’u henwau nhw o’r blaen. Roedd y nos fel twnnal hir a gola’r cerbyd yn felyn ar y bobol a’r rheini’n hepian. Rhai diarth oedd rhai ohonyn nhw, rhai o Gwlad Alltud , hefyd ac mi sodrais i ngwynab yn y gwydyr yn gwatsiad y diferion glaw’n rhedag ras ar draws ffenast allan rhag ofn i neb fy nabod i. Ta waeth ges i sleifio allan a’r bora’n glasu ar orsaf , Gwastadaros heb i neb ffindio mod i heb dalu’n iawn. Arwyddion mawr crand sgynnyn nhw’n deud enw’r lle ond cytiau sment heb blastar ar

Robin Llywelyn (1958-) lives in Minffordd, in north-west Wales, where he is Managing Director of the Italianate village of Portmeirion, designed by his architect grandfather CloughWilliams Ellis. He came to prominence as a writer when his first novel, Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background, 1992) won the National Eisteddfod’s Prose Medal in 1992. His subsequent works confirmed his reputation as one of Wales’s most innovative contemporary prose writers. His second novel, O’r Harbwr Gwag i’r Cefnfor Gwyn (From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, 1994), a tender love story which can also be read as a political fable, moves through unspecified countries reminiscent of parts of Eastern Europe before ending in New York.

It won him the Prose Medal for the second time and the BBC Writer of the Year award.

Selected publications

Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background, Gomer, 1992) O’r Harbwr Gwag i’r Cefnfor Gwyn (From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, Gomer, 1994) Y Dwˆr Mawr Llwyd (The Big Grey Water, Gomer, 1995) Llanfrothen, Cyfres y Man a’r Lle (Llanfrothen, in the series Places, Gwasg Gregynog, 1996)

Selected translations

O’r Harbwr Gwag i’r Cefnfor Gwyn UK: From Empty Harbour to White Ocean (Parthian, 1996) Italy: Da porto deserto a bianco oceano (Piero Manni, 2000)

Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn France: Etoile blanche sur fond blanc (Terre de Brume, 2003) UK: White Star (Parthian, 2004) Germany: Tee mit der Königen (Cambria Verlag, 1996) France: Quelques nouvelles du pays de Galles (Terre de Brume, 1998) UK: A White Afternoon (Parthian, 1998) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 2002, vol. 3&4) Italian: Un mondo, il mondo: racconti gallesi (Mobydick, 2002)

16 Wiliam Owen Roberts (1960-) was brought up in Garndolbenmaen, north Wales and now lives in Cardiff.

His first novel, Bingo! (1985) was described as the first postmodern Welsh novel, and marked the beginning of a period of new maturity in the history of the genre in the Welsh-language.

Y Pla (Pestilence, 1987), his second novel, won him an Arts Council of Wales award in 1988, and has been translated into English, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Slovak. His work includes plays and several television and radio series. Paradwys, his most recent novel (Paradise, 2001), is a monumental work which moves between Wales, London, Paris and Haiti in the late eighteenth century.

Selected publications Bingo! (Bingo!, Gwasg Dwyfor, 1985) Y Pla (Pestilence, Annwn, 1987) Hunangofiant 1973-1987: Cyfrol 1, Y Blynyddoedd Glas (Autobiography 1973-1987: Volume 1, The Adolescent Years, Annwn, 1990) Caerdydd, Cyfres Y Man a’r Lle (Cardiff, in the series, Places, Gwasg Gregynog, 1996) Paradwys (Paradise, Barddas, 2001)

Selected translations Y Pla UK hbk: Pestilence (Hamish Hamilton, 1991) Netherlands: De pest in Dolbenmaen (Altamira-becht, 1992) German hbk: Der schwarze Tod (List, 1993) German pbk: Der schwarze Tod (Knaur, 1995) UK pbk: Pestilence (Seren, 1997)

France: La peste noire (Terre de Brume, 2000) Slovakia: Mor (Drewo a Srd, 2003) USA hbk: Pestilence (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2003) Hungary & Romania, Hungarian Edition: Ragály (Koinónia Kiädo, 2004) UK: A White Afternoon (Parthian, 1998) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 2002, vol. 3&4)

Forthcoming translations Y Pla: Romania, Romanian Edition (Koinónia Kiädo, 2004)

y waliau fel acw sgynnyn nhw a’r llifoleuadau’n diffodd bob gafal fel yn Dre’cw. Rêl bobol ffordd hyn ydyn nhw hefyd achos peth cynta ddeudodd neb wrtha’i oedd, ‘Su’mai diarth, mynd yn bell?’

Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background, 1992)

I didn’t get off where I was supposed to but carried on into the night, past places I’d never heard of. The night was like a long tunnel and the carriage lights lit up dozing passengers in their yellow glare. Some of the people were foreigners, some even from the Exile States. I held my face to the glass and watched raindrops running races down the pane outside. At Gwastadaros siding I slipped out into a blue dawn. It has a big name for a small place, the sign is huge but there are only a few unplastered concrete huts on the station. Even the searchlights keep going on and off just like ours. The people here are very much like we are back home: the first thing anyone said to me was ‘Where’re you from? Going far?’

White Star (2004)

Both books can be read as allegories for Welsh culture and the survival of the language. Critic John Rowlands has shown how the characters’ names in Seren Wen are derived from a fourteenth century manuscript. Here are scenes of a Wales changing so fast that its children will inherit nothing but international museum culture – ‘No touching the exhibits’. Thus even the past, where we are all asylum seekers, seems to betray us. This is a familiar social theme, but few

incidents are as clear or as personal as this in Llywelyn’s prose: Daliodd Gregor ei lygaid. Roedd holl rwystredigaethau’i ffawd yn cronni tu mewn iddo. Roedd o’n meddwl am Iwerydd yn aros amdano a fyntau’n methu cyrraedd… Ac oedd cysgod o wên yn chwarae ar wefusau lleithion y mab tew. Daliai Gregor ei lygaid, a’i fol yn corddi. ‘Fedri di handlo hyn , ta?’ meddai a fyntau yn synnu at nerth ei dalcen yn plymio ato ac yn ei daro fel pelen ffair yn erbyn cneuen goco ei wep.

O’r Harbwr Gwag i’r Cefnfor Gwyn (From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, 1994)

Gregor held his stare. The frustrations that had filled his life in recent times began to well up within him as he contemplated the fat youth…He was thinking about… all the things he should have done… and the life that had been lived here between these white hills. And in that fat boy’s face he saw the future…

Gregor was surprised how calm he felt in the knowledge that he was going to have to hurt him.

From Empty Harbour to White Ocean (1996)

It has been said that Robin Llywelyn’s theme is that of progress towards justice where the last shall be first, and the meek shall inherit the earth. O’r Harbwr Gwag lends itself to such a reading.

Nevertheless, translation can mean loss and some diminishment.

In the original, Seren Wen combines colloquialisms with a literary idiom derived from medieval Welsh. The former are translatable, the latter may pose problems. Nuances of registers and variety of texture are thus blurred. Yet even in their

translated form, these writings are dramatically different from the work of the English language novelists.

There is no trace of the dutiful here, and, with the rare exception of the above passage, little anger or desperation. All Roberts and Llywelyn have to prove is the strength of their imagination.

Both our Welsh and English language novelists have in common a noir theme, or as critic Tony Bianchi has put it, the ‘unheimlich’, ‘the alien’. Noir is an established genre, but can lead to the gothic or the grotesque, moving closer to parody, pastiche and irony. One novelist now surprisingly labelled noir is Angharad Tomos, a celebrated language campaigner. Her first novel, Yma o Hyd (Still Here, 1985) purports to have been written on toilet paper by a woman locked up in an English prison for demanding language rights. Praised because of this for ‘high seriousness’ and ‘moral integrity’, and lauded as ‘the most authoritative of her generation in her human awareness’, it has been said that Angharad Tomos ‘would cringe at the idea of being coupled with the avant-garde’.

However, the novel seems to be set in prison not because of the writer’s own experiences there, but because jail provides the type of claustrophobic, indeed, suffocating environment Tomos wishes to create.

We glimpse a dreariness never ending, and John Rowlands has even mischievously noted that ‘a stint in an English prison can seem like a merciful escape from that larger and more formidable prison which is Wales’.

Tomos’s third novel, Titrwm (Titrwm, 1994) carries on the theme of personal incarceration. This is a kind of soliloquy from a mother to her unborn child, a portrait of a personality hermetically sealed into a cell of appalling loneliness. The main character’s silence seems total, though it bristles with words. This book sets the ground for Wele’n Gwawrio (Dawn is Here) of 1997, which rejects the structure of plot and, in the words of critic Tony Bianchi, finds revelation only in an apocalyptic vision utterly beyond human agency. It is ‘a tale of paralysis and suspended death’, almost ‘an apotheosis’ of the noir genre. In fact the second half of the novel seems to take place with Ennyd, the main character, already within her coffin. Death itself is described: Ro’n i’n cael fy ngwasgu’n belen , fach a mhengliniau yn cyffwrdd fy nhalcen wrth i law anweledig gau yn ddwrn amdanaf.

(I was squeezed into a tiny ball and my knees touched my brow as an invisible fist took hold of me).

Wele’n Gwawrio (Dawn is Here, 1997)

Thus in the end she returns to the foetal position.

The second novel of younger novelist, Angharad Price, O! Tyn y Gorchudd (Remove the Veil, 2002) is written as the autobiography of a woman who never existed as an adult, having died in childhood. Thus a space is created in which anything might happen. Yet her imagined life is a quiet affair, and at the end she withdraws to a remote cottage on the very edge of the land that has

18 Angharad Tomos (1958-) was born in Llanwnda, north Wales.

She is one of the best known female novelists writing in Welsh today. Her work includes several novels and immensely popular books for children forming the series, Rala Rwdins, about characters living in an imaginary forest.

Her writing draws on a variety of subjects, from the more politically concerned prison diary, Yma o Hyd (Still Here, 1985), written in the voice of a woman imprisoned for her language campaigns, to the personal, contemplative narrative of Titrwm (Titrwm, 1994) whose narrator is a young woman who cannot speak or hear.

Selected publications Hen Fyd Hurt (A Daft Old World, Llys yr Eisteddfod, 1982) Yma o Hyd (Still Here, Y Lolfa, 1985) Si Hei Lwli (Lullaby, Y Lolfa, 1991) Titrwm (Titrwm, Y Lolfa, 1994) Wele’n Gwawrio (Dawn is Here, Y Lolfa, 1997)

19 defined her. Her last ambition is ‘to close the door on the world’, in fact to create her own stasis, almost to exist within her own womb; perhaps, for the first time, to be in control. If this is not an unusual wish for the very old, it seems typical of current fiction from Wales, with its images of disembodiment, the spaces between places, ‘the retreat of the self’ and fondness for irony as genres mutate before our eyes. Comparing Englishlanguage and Welsh-language novels, Bianchi writes that in ‘the Welsh-language novels of national decay, the same suspension of time, the same confined spaces, the same morbid psychological preoccupations, have a much stronger feel of the mortuary about them’.

That noir in all its shades is presently inescapable in Wales is clear.

However, it is already being satirised in English, while in Welsh, Mihangel Morgan has shown that he can adapt it to his own purposes. Noir for him is simply another language that he might choose to speak. Meanwhile, one post-modern experience for the Welsh themselves (and very possibly of the noir genre) might be the uncomfortable one of seeing themselves through the eyes of incomers or ‘white settlers’ from England. The novelist Martin Davis is a Welsh learner and describes himself therefore as ‘a mongrel’.

But he is another writer to champion the outsider and the dispossessed, though maybe from a more ironic perspective. His Llosgi’r Bont (Burning the Bridge, 1991) outlines the tensions created and fresh perspectives on identity achieved by in-migration to Welsh-speaking Wales.

As for Mihangel Morgan himself, he brings the style of a mischievous and experimental poet to Welsh fiction.

There is much that is enigmatic about his work, but thankfully any danger that he might be considered simply as deliberately perverse has vanished. John Rowlands has described Mihangel Morgan as ‘an iconoclast, a vandal who does everything which the national and literary meta-narrative forbids. He is the one who draws a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa’.

Considering that moustache has already been drawn and rubbed off in most other European countries, if Mihangel Morgan had not appeared naturally, the Welsh would have had to invent him as a measure of cultural emergency.

Rowlands sets the critical tone (despite ‘the fear of being relegated to pseuds’s corner’) when he describes Morgan’s first novel, Dirgel Ddyn (Secret Heart, 1993) as post-modern, post-religious and post-sexual. The characters are eccentric, even bizarre ‘marginalised creatures living on the rough edges of society, and they are never what they seem’. These are the victims of Thatcher (and now Tony Blair) that many Welsh writers evoke, but few as outrageously as Mihangel Morgan. In the undeveloped regions that capitalism has forgotten or abandoned a kind of grotesque irony flourishes. By ‘post-sexual’ the critic seems to mean the author’s use of ‘the aesthetics of camp’ and incidents such as the scene in Dirgel Ddyn when the acknowledgement that a rapist is minimally endowed turns brutality into farce. But despite

Angharad Price (1972-) was brought up near Caernarfon in north Wales and studied Modern Languages at Oxford, before going on to complete a D.phil. on the work of the Welsh writer, Robin Llywelyn. Her most recent novel, O! Tyn y Gorchudd (Remove the Veil, 2002) was very warmly received and was awarded the coveted National Eisteddfod medal for prose in 2002 and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award in 2003. Also in 2003 she travelled to numerous festivals across Europe as one of five writers selected for the Scritture Giovani European programme.

Angharad Price is a lecturer in Welsh at Cardiff University and has published several critical volumes on contemporary Welsh literature, and translations between German and Welsh.

Selected publications

Selected translations

Tania’r Tacsi (Tania the Taxi Driver, Gomer, 1999) O! Tyn y Gorchudd (Remove the Veil, Gomer, 2002)

UK: A White Afternoon (Parthian, 1998) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 2002, vol. 3&4) Italy: Confini/Borders/Grenzen/Grenser/ Ffiniau (Scritture Giovani, 2003)

20

21 indications that he treats writing as a game, such hilarity is a weapon the novelist uses with great seriousness.

Martin Davis was brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, but spent regular periods as a child in Llanrwst and Porthmadog, north Wales.

He has lived for many years now in west Wales where he works as a freelance translator and writer. In addition to his fiction and poetry, he has written for television and radio, as well as for children. His most recent work of fiction, Os Dianc Rhai (Should Some Escape, 2003) is the first of two volumes of a family saga which spans three generations and three countries, moving between Wales, Oxford and Germany during the Second World War. Selected publications poetry Chwain y Mwngrel (The Mongrel’s Fleas, Y Lolfa, 1986) prose Llosgi’r Bont (Burning the Bridge, Y Lolfa, 1991) Rhithiau (Illusions, Y Lolfa, 1992) Brân ar y Crud (Crow on the Crib, Y Lolfa, 1995) Os Dianc Rhai (Should Some Escape, Y Lolfa, 2003)

Selected translations UK: A White Afternoon (Parthian, 1998)

Perhaps Dan Gadarn Goncrit (Under Solid Concrete, 1999) best summarises Morgan’s noirish methods. Tony Bianchi describes its hero as ‘caught up in a complex cycle of frustrated searches and concealments’. Eventually and inevitably he also becomes a victim in the ‘Welsh House of Horror’ and ends up where the novel’s title suggests. ‘Here the stock and often ridiculous conventions of subterfuge and duplicity in the mystery genre are moulded into a grotesque parable of social dysfunction.’

The song writer Elvis Costello has claimed that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’.

Writing about Mihangel Morgan can seem similarly laboured. He needs to be read. Hugely prolific, Mihangel Morgan is also one of Wales’s leading short story writers, and has done as much as anyone to extend the scope of the genre.

Welsh-language prose writers have always been fewer than poets.

Indeed, up until the 1980s critics could assume that there was no such thing as ‘the Welsh novel’ only ‘the novel in Welsh’. Yet since then Welsh fiction has been radically altered, quickly diversifying and in places becoming extraordinary.

At last there exists a sufficient critical mass of texts available to generate sustainable exploration of ‘the Welsh novel’. In fact, the mood is one that anticipates challenging, inexplicable, and possibly important things to come.

Mihangel Morgan (1955-) was brought up in Aberdâr in south Wales and now lives near Aberystwyth in west Wales where he lectures in twentieth century Welsh literature. His first novel Dirgel Ddyn (Secret Heart, 1993) won him the National Eisteddfod Prose Medal and marked the beginning of a career as one of Wales’s foremost contemporary authors. Since then he has published prolifically, concentrating on prose fiction. Morgan throws stones at the glass-house of the Welsh establishment. His fragmentary world is populated by figures who are more anti- than hero. His most recent novel, Croniclau Pentre Simon (The Chronicles of Simon Village, 2003), is ostensibly set in a small Welsh village in the Victorian era.

Selected publications prose Hen Lwybrau a Storïau Eraill (Old Paths and Other Stories, Gomer, 1992) Dirgel Ddyn (Secret Heart, Llys Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, 1993; Gomer, 1996) Saith Pechod Marwol (Seven Deadly Sins, Y Lolfa, 1993) Te Gyda’r Frenhines (Tea with the Queen, Gomer, 1994) Tair Ochr y Geiniog (Three Sides of the Coin, Gomer, 1996) Melog (Melog, Gomer, 1997) Dan Gadarn Goncrit (Under Solid Concrete, Y Lolfa, 1999) Cathod a Chwˆn (Cats and Dogs, Y Lolfa, 2000) Y Ddynes Ddirgel (Mysterious Woman, Y Lolfa, 2001) Pan Oeddwn Fachgen (When I Was a Child, Y Lolfa, 2002) Croniclau Pentre Simon (The Chronicles of Pentre Simon, Y Lolfa, 2003)

poetry Diflaniad Fy Fi (The Disappearance of My Me, 1988) Beth yw Rhif Ffôn Duw (What is God’s Phone Number?, 1991)

Selected translations UK: Modern Poetry in Translation, No.7 (Spring 1995) Germany: Und suchte meine Zunge ab nach Worten (Edition Druckhaus Neunzehn, 1996) Germany: Tee mit der Königin (Cambria Verlag, 1996) France: Quelques nouvelles du pays de Galles (Terre de Brume, 1998) UK: A White Afternoon (Parthian, 1998) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, 2001) Italy: Un mondo, il mondo: racconti gallesi (Mobydick, 2002) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 2002, vol. 3&4)

Forthcoming translations UK: Melog (Seren)

23 MAPPING THE DARK Recent English-language Fiction

Profiles 25 Emyr Humphreys 26 Christopher Meredith 27 Duncan Bush 28 John Williams 30 Sean Burke 31 Niall Griffiths 32 Lewis Davies 33 Desmond Barry 34 Stevie Davies 35 Anna Davis

25 It is tempting to divide current fiction

by Welsh writers into two distinctive types: the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’, the latter borrowing from and developing the ‘noir’ genre, with pretensions towards the surreal. Writers in the Welsh language have taken this a good deal further than the English novelists.

Emyr Humphreys is a realist. On the face of it, his people might seem a little dull. They are academics, media folk, politicians, all representing the decent, upwardly mobile Wales of the last half century, its national aspirations and the thwarting of its ambition. Humphreys writes ‘the Protestant novel’ whose characters demonstrate conflict between work, traditional values and individual aspiration and conscience.

Readers of fiction from Wales’s newer novelists will encounter isolated and alienated protagonists.

Duncan Bush has a Cardiff mechanic gleaming with psychosis; Christopher Meredith tells of steelworkers who must soon sink or swim, John Williams celebrates ducking and diving urban survivors.

As to Welsh-language novelists, there are a variety of experiments with magic realism and the simply extraordinary. Compared with these socially excluded or fanciful creations, products of collapsing societies and inheritors of what looks like chaos, Humphreys’s people inhabit a historically recognisable yet morally idealised Wales, where there remain individual concepts of duty, a sense of belonging, and loyalty to a way of life.

Critic Roland Mathias describes the early books as ‘the first presentation in prose of characters with nationalist plans and intentions […] the tone is cautionary, moral and pessimistic’.

Later books aim for ‘a larger scale’.

Mathias believes volumes like National Winner (1971) and Flesh and Blood (1974) are associated ‘ever more intricately, with the discovery of the pattern of ‘good’ in society – a pattern which is the link with traditional Wales’. This scale of ambition makes Humphreys unique as a Welsh novelist and renders him remote from younger writers, most of whom lack, or would not seek to develop, a coherent moral philosophy.

The best introduction to Humphreys’s work is A Toy Epic (1958), a prize-winning novel originally written as Y Tri Llais (The Three Voices) in Welsh. Here we meet three schoolboys approaching definitive moments in their lives.

Although the characters might be viewed as emblematic, coming from different backgrounds and indicating possible directions in which their country could develop, A Toy Epic is a marvellously delicate and acutely observed study of the relationship between three intelligent young men.

Undoubtedly it is one of the finest and most deftly rounded novels in English by any Welsh writer.

Critic Tony Brown offers a striking reading of Humphreys’s ‘ambition’: ‘He adopted a minimalist style, in an attempt to minimise the power of English to distort Welsh experience, and as a conscious corrective to

the flamboyant wordiness that seemed to him to characterise some Anglophone Welsh writing: he imported alienating narrative techniques from Brechtian theatre to manipulate readers into glimpsing and confronting their own historical condition, hoping to liberate them from the false consciousness of colonialism; and deep beneath his surface realist style he buried Welsh mythic matter […] intending that readers should gradually come to share his own adolescent initiatory sense of coming to full identity.’

However, many of the newer writers have nothing in common with Emyr Humphreys, or his sense of history and cultural and moral ethics. For them, history is dead. Their protagonists have no philosophical systems. In fact, they rarely exhibit any type of belief, not even in themselves, and are thus unprotected from the modern maelstrom. Their very vulnerability is the key to understanding them. What characterises them is their own flux.

Realist or not, Humphreys has never been considered a champion of the working class. This was the role of Ron Berry (1920-1997). Yet Berry’s gnarled prose style and exuberant Anglo-Welsh vocabulary of manual work, the like of which we will never see again, can be viewed today as unreal, and at times as astonishing.

His era was the relatively prosperous 1960s, and his characters were miners, builders, boxers. Of women, he could make little.

Today, Christopher Meredith, whose style owes little to Berry, is the leading novelist of post-industrial English-speaking Wales. Author of three novels, Meredith has a definite geographical territory. This is a distinctive area known as the ‘Heads of the Valleys’ in south Wales, birthplace of the iron industry, heavily industrialised for two hundred years, yet where a spectacular topography remains in view, taunting and tantalising communities that, according to European statistics, were economically and sociallydeprived throughout much of the last century. Almost inevitably he depicts a post-industrial world from which old certainties have departed, not always for the worse. His fascination lies with how people create strategies to cope with changes in which the social is inextricable from the private. Or fail to adapt.

In terms of a story unfolding, Meredith’s first novel, Shifts (1988), remains his best. The action takes place in the late 1970s. A steelworks is due to close, a marriage to be betrayed, a country about to turn its back on the workers who created its world image and much of its most powerful twentieth century iconography. In fact, Shifts has parallels with American depictions of the lives of Vietnam veterans, such as Bobby Ann Mason’s In Country (1985). It is a book also concerned with language. Keith, one of three central characters, is an amateur historian. But without knowledge of Welsh, he is continually frustrated in his research. Here is a character whose ideals, confused as they

are, are similar to some of Emyr Humphreys’s creations.

Today, 10% of Keith’s Heads of the Valleys people speak Welsh, yet the truth is that the language suffered an abrupt and catastrophic disappearance from most of this area. Keith’s wife’s affair is symbolic of this social ‘betrayal’ and Keith’s own impotence in the face of an unintelligible past. This ‘language theme’ helps to give Shifts a host of European resonances. Indeed, Meredith brackets himself with Baltic writers who have struggled with the idea of identity in the Soviet shadow.

He writes that as a Welsh novelist in the Baltic he kept meeting himself ‘restated in different terms’.

Meredith’s third novel, Sidereal Time (1998), deals with the mid 1990s. The main character is a secondary school teacher. Now even the idea of steel and heavy industry is redundant: Sarah recognised the name. A factory twelve miles away, close to her parents. Where there used to be moorland and header ponds for the steelworks, now there was a nonplace sliced by overlit roads, a shedscape of windowless superstores with their carparks, and windowless factories.

Life has become stranger. ‘Stress’ has been discovered, together with what the novel’s editor describes as ‘alienated desperation’. Getting drunk is a temporary fix because that is what this culture demands.

Meredith’s imagery of anaesthesia, in all its forms, including linguistic, is powerful.

Emyr Humphreys (1919-), born in Prestatyn, north Wales, is one of the foremost Welsh novelists. He is the author of over twenty novels, of short story volumes, verse and non-fiction work, and was described by the poet R. S. Thomas as ‘the supreme interpreter of Welsh life’. A conscientious objector, he was sent to work on the land during the Second World War, and subsequently went as a war relief worker to the Middle East and then to Italy, where he worked for Save the Children. In 1972, after remarkable success as a young novelist, winning the Somerset Maugham Award for Hear and Forgive (1952) and the Hawthornden Prize for A Toy Epic (1958), his most famous novel, written in both Welsh and English, he embarked on a career as a full-time writer.

Selected publications The Little Kingdom (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946) Hear and Forgive (Gollancz, 1952) Y Tri Llais (The Three Voices, Llyfrau’r Dryw, 1958) A Toy Epic (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958) Outside the House of Baal (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965) The Best of Friends (Hodder & Stoughton, 1978) Bonds of Attachment (Macdonald, 1991) Old People are a Problem (Seren, 2003)

Selected translations & foreign editions USA: Hear and Forgive (Putnam, 1953) France: Ecoute et pardonne (Plon, 1955) USA: A Man’s Estate (McGraw-Hill, 1956) Sweden: En man arvedel (Bonnier, 1957) USA: The Italian Wife (McGraw-Hill, 1958) Wales: Etifedd y glyn (Gomer, 1981) Wales: Darn o dir (Dwyfor, 1986) Germany: Erkundungen: 28 walisische Erzähler (Volk und Welt, 1988) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001)

26 Christopher Meredith (1954-) was born in Tredegar, south Wales. After graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, he worked as a steelworker and as a schoolteacher. For the last decade, he has taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.

He has published widely in magazines and journals, including Planet, TLS, New Statesman, and Poetry Wales.

He has won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, as well as several Arts Council of Wales awards. The variety of his work to date displays the range of his literary ability, from his postindustrial first novel to a historical novel written in the form of a first person bildungsroman, and most recently, a novel about a school teacher.

Selected publications This (Poetry Wales Press, 1984) Shifts (Seren, 1988) Snaring Heaven (Seren, 1990) Griffri (Seren, 1991) Cefn Golau: shooting a novelist, in the series Places (Gwasg Gregynog, 1997) Sidereal Time (Seren, 1998) Nadolig Bob Dydd (Christmas Every Day, Gomer, 2000)

Selected translations France: Griffri (Terre de Brume, 2002) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001)

27 Sidereal Time with its appalled despatches from the front stands out amongst Welsh school novels. Its action takes place in a post-modern environment where both present and future, are unreliable texts.

Meredith’s teachers, literate people lost in illiterate times, must confront the cultural vacuum of the non-place and are charged with humanising it.

After years when novelists largely ignored Cardiff, there have been several recent vivid depictions of life in the Welsh capital. In fact Cardiff, for the first time in its history, is now home to a wide variety of novelists.

As to ‘the Cardiff novel’, Duncan Bush’s Glass Shot of 1991 will one day be regarded as a seminal work, as it seems to forecast and anticipate the genre of ‘Cardiff noir’.

Bush’s acute observational skills are revealed at length here. Glass Shot is a study of one man’s obsessional stalking of a woman, of power and sexual loathing, and the violent dead-ends of some forms of masculinity. It is a gripping and uneasy read, referencing pornography and male role-playing.

What makes its antagonist a compulsive figure is that his literacy and raw-edged intellect do not conflict with his manual work. Stew Boyle is a tyre-fitter who knows all about existentialism. What he rejects are bourgeois values, the city’s herd mentality. Both urban anti-hero and dangerous loner, Boyle cannot exist outside the city. He despises the rest of Wales because it lies outside his experience. The women he doesn’t trust are the ones he cannot control.

And for Stew Boyle, sex is control.

Duncan Bush (1946-) was born in Cardiff. He was educated at Warwick University and Wadham College, Oxford. He first came to prominence in 1974 when he won the Welsh Arts Council’s Young Poets Competition. Since then, in addition to his short fiction and work for theatre and television, he has published seven volumes of poetry and two novels. In 1995 he was awarded the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year for his collection of poetry, Masks (1994). Bush is particularly good at exploring the impact of political forces on individual lives. His first novel, The Genre of Silence (1988), combines reportage, poetry and autobiography to describe the persecution of fictional 1930s Russian poet, Victor Bal, whilst his second novel explores masculinity in the context of the 1984/5 miners’ strike in south Wales. Bush is also a translator and has published important translations of French and Italian poetry in English. He divides his time between Luxembourg and south Wales.

Selected publications

Selected translations

poetry Masks (Seren, 1994) The Hook (Seren, 1997) Midway (Seren, 1998)

Germany: Erkundungen: 28 walisische Erzähler (Volk und Welt, 1988) Belgium: Poésie des Régions d’Europe: pays de Galles (Revue de la Maison de la Poésie, Namur, 1994) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) Québec: Quarante et un poètes de la Grande Bretagne (Ecrits des Forges, 2003)

fiction The Genre of Silence (Seren, 1988) Glass Shot (hbk: Secker & Warburg, 1991; pbk: Mandarin, 1993)

28 Duncan Bush often appears as a maverick, a role he relishes: ‘Part of a writer’s job is to avoid being co-opted or suborned.

Doing so out loud, especially to those whose sole concern is to belong, can look like spitting in the soup, as the French say [...] From the viewpoint of culture it’s an absolutely salutary action. It’s what adds taste’.

Duncan Bush also looks hard at how writers have lived and worked. Thus in the late 1980’s he produced The Genre of Silence, the fictionalised biography of a poet, Victor Bal, writing in a totalitarian Soviet culture.

With Glass Shot, this is the author’s most demanding work, a unique text that can be easily mistaken for factual documentary. But the poems are all by Bush, as is the narrative and inevitable denouement. Bal’s view of some of his contemporaries might be shared by Duncan Bush: Poets? Writers? Hardly.

But there’s no surer way to fame for camp dogs: licking the hand that feeds them space to do so, prints their name.

John Williams is a Cardiffian who has returned to the capital after years in London, where his books describe transitory urban life, some of his streetwise characters kept afloat by an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music culture. They take for granted its psychic importance. However, the Cardiff he encounters is a different place from the one he used to know.

Today Cardiff people drink twice the average UK alcoholic intake. The city is now more clearly bilingual, though many of the working-class landmarks

of pub and club have been swept away and replaced by corporate emporia. There is ostentatious affluence. Hyperbole rules - such as the claim that the redeveloped Cardiff Bay is ‘Europe’s most exciting waterfront’. Such a city demands novelists, and they are arriving.

This passing of the ‘old’ Cardiff is mourned by Williams in a series of noirish novels, such as The Prince of Wales (2003): ‘When you close down all the dark and seedy places, what you’re left with is a fake. It isn’t real any more…’

But this surely is the conventional complaint about the post-modern environment, heard all over the world. Critic Tony Bianchi writes that the ‘tendency to cultivate an unreflecting nostalgia for the sinister-as-authentic is one of the intellectual limitations of noir’.

Already, Welsh-language novelists such as Robin Llywelyn are turning the complaint on its head, using their own alienation to liberate themselves from the demands of what is supposed to be ‘real’, tapping in to the understanding of and appetite for alienation that they believe their audience to possess.

This is happening in a way in Sean Burke’s Deadwater (2002), ostensibly a Cardiff ‘crime’ novel. Burke takes us through the dark underbelly typical of almost any modern metropolis, and the environment of many of our novelists, encountering characters involved with drugs, pornography and crime. Set in the political dog days of 1989, it predates the regeneration of Cardiff Bay, with

John Williams (1961-) was born in Cardiff, where he now lives, after a period working in London as a journalist for The Mail on Sunday, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the magazine NME and as contributing editor for GQ magazine. He is the author of six volumes. His latest novel, The Prince of Wales (2003) completes his acclaimed Cardiff trilogy, a contemporary urban drama, which depicts life in the shadows of the Welsh capital.

Selected publications Into The Badlands (Paladin, 1991) Bloody Valentine (HarperCollins, 1994) Faithless (Serpent’s Tail, 1997) Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (Bloomsbury, 1999) Cardiff Dead (Bloomsbury, 2000) The Prince of Wales (Bloomsbury, 2003)

Selected translations Badlands France: Badlands (Rivages, 1994) Faithless France: Gueule de Bois (Rivages, 2003) Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub Portugal: Cinco Pubs, Dois Bares e Um Nightclub (ASA, 2000) Croatia: Pet pubova, dva bara i nocni klub (Hena, 2001) France: Cinq pubs, deux bars et une boîte de nuit (L’esprit des péninsules, 2001) Germany: 5 Pubs, 2 Bars, 1 Nachtclub (Droemer Knaur, 2001) Cardiff Dead Denmark: Cardiff Tur Retur (PP Forlag, 2002) France: Cardiff Dead (L’esprit des péninsules, 2002) Croatia: Povratak u Cardiff (Fraktura, 2003) Portugal: Cardiff Morta (Teorema, 2004)

30 Sean Burke was born to an Irish family in Cardiff in 1961.

He studied at the universities of Canterbury and Edinburgh.

His first book, The Death and the Return of the Author, on literary theory, was published in 1992. His first novel, the unusual thriller, Deadwater (2002) struck critics with its surprising lyricism and muscular and darkly beautiful language. Burke now lives in the north-east of England and teaches at the University of Durham.

Selected publications Deadwater (Serpent’s Tail, 2002)

31 its glass-fronted Welsh parliament and new Millennium Arts Centre.

Main character, Jack Farrissey, wakes up out of pit-black alcoholic amnesia.

There is blood on his clothes. On the face of it this is an archetypal melodramatic predicament straight out of 1950s Los Angeles. Classic noir, it would seem. Yet Deadwater is more deeply pathological, and according to one critic ‘combines anticipation of impending catastrophe with a sense of utter stasis, as though history and the promise of change and escape which it offers had ground to a halt and given way to endless threatening space’.

Niall Griffiths has described Deadwater as coming ‘from a kind of anguished acceptance of our common squalor, a rare type of despairing, enraged love’. This phrase ‘our common squalor’ seems crucial to understanding much new writing from Wales and especially Griffiths’s own ferocious work.

This writer has chosen to live in Wales and has set a good deal of his fiction around the university town of Aberystwyth. His people are bizarre creations. The cover of Sheepshagger (2001) defines its main character as ‘a feral ignoble savage from a near derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales’.

Indeed, many of his characters lead furtive lives, seeming almost beyond alienation. It is difficult to imagine more different people from those of Emyr Humphreys’s novels.

Of the ‘new’ novelists, Griffiths is one of the most prolific. His style is relentless, almost feverish, including

stream-of-consciousness passages and animated descriptions of drink and drug bingeing. Clare Morgan has written that there is ‘genuine shock value in Griffiths’s treatment of the sense of transcendent power addiction bestows’. At times he seems more of a prose poet than novelist, capable of fine imagistic moments. These can serve as a necessary balance for sometimes overwrought vernacular invective.

Niall Griffiths’s characters might seem lost souls. Their tragedy is that they are conscious of personal dispossession, but have no clear idea of what they have lost. Their very verbosity appears a device to fill a spiritual vacuum.

One writer who has recently left Cardiff is Lewis Davies, who came to prominence as a playwright, and prose writer with his bestselling Work, Sex and Rugby (1993). His writing to date shows a great deal of variety of styles and subjects. His Freeways (1997), for example, is an exploration of the USA’s Route 66.

However his most lasting literary contribution to Wales might prove his creation of publishing house, Parthian. This has promoted new Welsh fiction, and brought a host of new names into the public eye.

Davies’s own more recent novel, My Piece of Happiness (2001) is a story about disabled young adults dependent on the support which parents and the healthcare system struggle to provide.

Niall Griffiths (1966-) was born in Liverpool, a city with close associations with north Wales.

He has lived for many years now in Aberystwyth, on the coast of west Wales, the setting for much of his work.

Griffiths’s writing, often keen and frank, is characterised by a raw energy and a mesmerising command of idiom. His work has featured in magazines and on TV across the world. A film of Kelly & Victor is currently being prepared and Griffiths will be the subject of a Channel 4 documentary on his life and work to be screened in the summer of 2004. He also writes short plays for radio, and is a restaurant critic for the Wales-based magazine, Redhanded. His fifth novel, Wreckage, is due out in 2005.

Selected publications Grits (Jonathan Cape, 2000) Sheepshagger (Jonathan Cape, 2001) Kelly & Victor (Jonathan Cape, 2002) Stump (Jonathan Cape, 2003)

Selected translations & foreign editions Sheepshagger France: Ianto l’enragé (Editions de l’Olivier, 2001) USA: Sheepshagger (Thomas Dunne Books, 2002) Croatia: Seljac˘ina (VBZ, 2002)

Forthcoming translations Sheepshagger: Italy (Feltrinelli) Kelly & Victor: Spain (Ediciones del Bronce); Italy (Feltrinelli) Stump: Italy (Feltrinelli); USA (Graywolf); Latvia (AGB)

32 Lewis Davies (1967-) was born in Penrhiwtyn in south Wales.

He lived and worked in the area before establishing the publishing house Parthian in 1993. He came to prominence as a writer with the publication of his best-selling first novel, Work, Sex and Rugby in 1993.

Since then, he has produced a variety of work, from the murder mystery, Tree of Crows (1996), to the history of Route 66 in the US, Freeways (1997), which won the John Morgan Award, and My Piece of Happiness (2001), a novel about caring for the disabled.

He also writes for theatre, and his new play, Football, will premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004.

Selected publications Work, Sex and Rugby (Parthian, 1993) Tree of Crows (Parthian, 1996) Freeways (Parthian, 1997) My Piece of Happiness (Parthian, 2001) As I was a Boy Fishing (Parthian, 2003)

33 Desmond Barry was born and brought up in Wales.

He moved to the US in the mid 80s, but recently returned to Wales to take up a post as a fellow at the University of Glamorgan. His first novel, A Chivalry of Crime, a story about America’s outlaw gunslinger, Jesse James, was voted Best First Novel of the Year by The Western Writers Association of America (2001) and was short-listed for the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award (2001). It was described by Peter Carey as a ‘tour de force’.

Selected publications

This theme of ‘disablement’ is striking, and is encountered in much recent English-language fiction from Wales. The main protagonist in Richard John Evans’s Entertainment (2001) is paraplegic. Niall Griffiths’s Stump (2003) features a one-armed main character, while Davey Daunt in Desmond Barry’s A Bloody Good Friday (2002) wears a leg brace.

Countless others are periodically amnesiac due to alcohol, or troubled by bad drug experiences. It might be too easy to see all this as symbolic of people suffering effects of language and culture-loss, or postmodern alienation, but the degrees of physical and psychological damage amongst the newer writers’ characters should be noted.

A Bloody Good Friday follows a Welsh ‘hard man’ and depicts brutal but ritualistic encounters, especially amongst the Welsh-Irish population of Merthyr Tydfil, many generations ago the leading European industrial town. Barry’s books deal with several forms of violence. For example, one novel follows the exploits of the USA’s nineteenthcentury ‘James Gang’. However, comparisons with American genremaster, Cormac McCarthy, seem premature. Desmond Barry is more sure-footed on home ground, and one can only feel that A Bloody Good Friday’s Davey Daunt speaks for the writer himself (and many Welsh people) when he demands: ‘who defines Welsh?’ – a heartfelt question because Wales has never been a unity. Its variety is its strength, but also the source of its

A Chivalry of Crime (USA: Little, Brown, 2000; UK: Jonathan Cape, 2000; Australia: Vintage, 2001) A Bloody Good Friday (UK: Jonathan Cape, 2002; Australia: Vintage, 2003) Cressida’s Bed (UK: Jonathan Cape, 2004; Australia: Vintage, 2005)

34 Stevie Davies (1946-), novelist and historian, was born in Wales. She is the author of nine novels and has received numerous awards for her work, including the Fawcett Society Book Prize and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award, whilst also being short-listed for the Portico Prize and long-listed more than once for both the Booker Prize and Orange Prize. Her most recent novel, Kith & Kin (2004), which has been long-listed for the Orange Prize 2004, is an exploration of the limits and conflicts of friendship, and reaffirms her reputation as a writer ‘in a class of her own’ (The Independent).

Selected publications Boy Blue (The Women’s Press, 1987) Closing the Book (The Women’s Press, 1994) Four Dreamers and Emily (The Women’s Press, 1996) The Web of Belonging (The Women’s Press, 1997) Impassioned Clay (The Women’s Press, 1999) The Element of Water (The Women’s Press, 2001) Kith & Kin (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004)

Selected translations The Element of Water Denmark: Vandets Element (PP Forlag, 2003)

35 identity problems. Definition, whether by politician or critic, can diminish the country. And those excluded, like so many of the literary characters now being created, feel disabled, dispossessed and angry.

The irony is that Wales is undoubtedly entering its richest ever period for novelists. Amongst a host of others, Stevie Davies stands out. One of her recent novels, The Element of Water of 2001, examines the legacy of war through the friendship of two boys.

This is an investigative study of remorse and loyalty, and what it means to survive. Meanwhile Anna Davis’s The Melting (2000), a noirish thriller about confidence tricksters, is further evidence that Cardiff today provides an ideally provocative setting for the novelist’s imagination.

Anna Davis (1971-) was born and brought up in Cardiff.

She studied at Manchester University and now lives in London with her husband and baby daughter. She is currently working on her fourth novel, The Shoe Queen, set in 1920s Paris. Anna Davis is also a journalist, writing frequently for The Guardian and was a contributor to the controversial All Hail the New Puritans short story collection in 2000.

Selected publications The Dinner (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999) The Melting (Hodder and Stoughton, 2000) Cheet (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001)

Selected translations The Dinner Turkey: Aksam Yemegi (Bilge, 1998) Germany: Dinner in Rot (Droemer Knaur, 1999) France: Le dîner (NiL Editions, 2001) Hebrew edition of The Dinner (Hed Arzi, 2002) Melting France: Les baratineurs (NiL Editions, 2002) Cheet Croatia: Taxi (Hena Com, 2002) Germany: Funf Handys und Ein Handicap (Lübbe, 2003) The Netherlands: Mobiele Minnaars (The House of Books, 2003) Germany: Meine Nächte sind schöner als deine Tage… (Lübbe Belletristik, 2003) Japanese edition of Cheet (Shinchosha, 2003) Russian edition of Cheet (Phantom Press, 2003) France: Taxi! (NiL Editions, 2004)

Forthcoming translations The Dinner: Russia (Phantom Press) Melting: Portugal (Editora Replicacao); Finland (Loki) Cheet: Poland (Zysk i Ska, Wydawnictwo Sc)

37 A LIVE TRADITION Recent Welsh-language Poetry

Profiles 39 Bobi Jones 40 Alan Llwyd 41 Twm Morys 42 Gwyneth Lewis 43 Emyr Lewis 44 Iwan Llwyd 45 Mererid Hopwood 46 Menna Elfyn

39 ‘…from within the perception of Welsh readers generally, if I exist at all, I am simply a tadpole in the corner of the pond, absolutely marginal.’

This is how Robert Maynard Jones (Bobi Jones, 1929-) described himself in 2003, during an interview with the magazine, Poetry Wales. On the face of it, it is a bizarre assertion.

For it is possible to consider Bobi Jones as the most important contemporary literary figure in the Welsh language. His output has been prodigious. As well as a constant stream of poetry collections, Bobi Jones has published literary criticism, linguistic studies, short stories and novels – in his adopted language of Welsh, a language he learned as a teenager in Cardiff in the 1940s. All of that writing is profoundly influenced by his evangelical Calvinism.

It is tempting to see Hunllef Arthur (Arthur’s Nightmare, 1986), a 21,000 line ‘anti-epic’, as his greatest achievement. The poem has been described as a European masterwork. It is a work so long and difficult that few Welsh readers are acquainted with it. As Bobi Jones himself states: ‘I write for a tight band. That is my simple aim in publishing, though not in writing.

My potential audience is miniscule, though I vainly hope the potential equipment is at any rate versatile and the subject somehow universal.’

According to the poet, the structure of Hunllef Arthur ‘is very simple’.

Arthur, the semi-mythical British king, who is asleep in his cave, ‘has a

nightmare which is simply the history of Wales’. However, the poet adds that ‘Hunllef Arthur is merely one part of a tripartite project. For me the complex experience of Wales (and every nation) must be time working through a unit of space via people. Hunllef Arthur is first of all the experience of Welsh time.

A second long poem, ‘Chwythu Plwc’ (Giving Up)… conveys the experience of Welsh space. The third part of the programme consists of ‘Portreadau’ (Portraits)’.

The author estimates there are well over one hundred of these ‘Portraits’. Certainly they are the best introduction to this writer’s work, together with his host of shorter poems. But these too pose problems. No-one has ever written 1

future lies not ‘in one-sided protest culture and conservation politics’ but in ‘a popular movement of conscious positive revival amongst adults’.

‘Getting hold of the language itself’, the poet says, ‘is a positive transforming task. Our own just heritage opens out, the country itself becomes more complete, old suppressed wounds are healed, new wonders and relationships are uncovered, and a more sensitive comprehension of internationalism in a more complete and enriching world is opened up’.

How to sum up this writer’s poetry?

I can think of nothing better than Basil Bunting’s homage to Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This, conceivably, might be applied by a modern Welsh poet to Bobi Jones’s work: (1)

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?

They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb, jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree, et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et léger.

Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

‘On the Fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, Complete Poems (2003)

Welsh in the way that Bobi Jones does. Thus it is best to see the frequent difficulty of his writing as fruit of both intellectual playfulness and experimentation, and to be grateful for the wit involved.

Some tadpole. But for Bobi Jones that pond is of oceanic proportions.

Indeed, this poet’s ambition is Homeric. Whether it is a delusion or not is irrelevant. What is important is that it exists. And Bobi Jones is a realist when it comes to Welsh.

He knows a firewall cannot be built around the language. For him its

In terms of industry, ambition and intellectual drive, it is possible to compare the younger writer, Alan Llwyd (1948-) with Bobi Jones. A formidably prolific poet who combines free verse with traditional metres and cynghanedd, even greater has been his contribution to Welsh literature as publisher, editor and anthologist, producing a stream of publications over the last thirty years.

The National Eisteddfod, one of Europe’s greatest cultural festivals, takes place in Wales during the first week of August ever year. Alan Llwyd has been a dominating figure there, twice winning both its two most high-profile prizes – the Crown, awarded for a long poem in the free metres, and the Chair, awarded for a long poem in the strict metres – in the same year. More recently he has had international success, writing the screenplay for the Oscarnominated Welsh-language film, Hedd Wyn, about a poet who died in the First World War. Alan Llwyd also edits the Welshlanguage magazine Barddas, reputed to be the second highest selling poetry journal in Britain and Ireland – an astonishing achievement for a journal with a potential audience of only half a million people. The Barddas line is simple. What makes Wales unique is its Welsh language. And for many, the most distinctive part of that language is cerdd dafod or poetic craft, and especially cynghanedd. This is a highly sophisticated poetic system of assonance, internal rhyme and ‘sprung rhythm’ governed by rules that can be traced back in part to the first extant Welsh-language poetry, towards the end of the sixth century.

Although ancient, there is a renaissance in the writing of cynghanedd, with a lively performance scene that attracts new poets.

Cynghanedd is not only a system of poetry, a unique linkage of sound and sense that provides entry into an extraordinarily rich sonic world. It is a way of thought and indeed a kind of

Bobi Jones (1929-) was born and brought up in Cardiff.

He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

An important literary theorist, whose critical work takes in Welsh literature from the 6th century to the present day, linguistics, theology, studies in education, practical criticism, in addition to literary theory, he has also produced a prolific body of poetry, as well as prose. His ‘anti-epic’ poem Hunllef Arthur (Arthur’s Nightmare, 1986) described as one of the literary masterpieces of twentieth-century Europe, is one of the longest poems in any language.

Selected publications poetry Hunllef Arthur (Arthur’s Nightmare, Barddas, 1986) Casgliad o Gerddi (Collected Poems, Barddas, 1989) Canu Arnaf (Song’s End, 2 vols, Barddas, 1994, 1995) Ynghylch Tawelwch (About Silence, Barddas, 1998) Ôl Troed (Footprint, Barddas, 2003) prose Epistol Serch a Selsig (The Epistle of Love and Sausages, Gomer, 1997)

Selected translations UK: Selected Poems (Christopher Davies, 1987) Valencia: Poesia Gallesa Actual (Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, 1992)

UK: Modern Poetry in Translation (Spring 1995) Germany: Und suchte meine Zunge ab nach Worten (Edition Druckhaus Neunzehn, 1996) USA: Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (New Native Press, 1997) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phsatelh ot yelc (Plamak, issue 3&4, 2002) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003) UK: The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: a facing-text anthology (Carcanet, 2003)

40 Alan Llwyd (1948-) was brought up on the Llyˆn peninsula in north-west Wales.

He is at the centre of the poetry scene in Wales, as the editor of Barddas, the bestselling Welsh-language poetry magazine, and the editorial director of Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, the publishing imprint of the magazine.

A prolific poet, he has also published numerous books of criticism, biographies, poetry anthologies, and wrote the screenplay for the film Hedd Wyn, which was nominated for an Oscar. His poetry, drawing on both his rural background and the more urban environment of his home in south Wales, has built him the reputation as the most dedicated and accomplished practitioner of cynghanedd, both in the strict metres and in free verse.

Selected publications Cerddi Alan Llwyd 1968-1990: Y Casgliad Cyflawn Cyntaf (The Poetry of Alan Llwyd 1968-1990: The First Complete Collection, Barddas, 1990) Sonedau i Janice a Cherddi Eraill (Sonnets for Janice and Other Poems, Barddas, 1996) Ffarwelio â Chanrif (Goodbye to a Century, Barddas, 2000)

Selected translations Valencia: Poesia Gallesa Actual (Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, 1992) UK: Modern Poetry in Translation (Spring 1995) USA: Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (New Native Press, 1997) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003)

41 philosophy. Many doubt whether it is translatable. Indeed, it is important for many that cynghanedd is not translated, as it presents Welsh people with access to a dimension into which the English language, whatever its other powers, simply cannot follow. This provides it with massive significance.

Twm Morys (1961-), an iconic rock singer and musician as well as one of Wales’s foremost writers of cynghanedd, now mostly forbids attempted translations of his work.

The working traditions of the Welsh strict-metre poet, he writes, are at least ‘three quarters as old as Christ.

His craft has become another language yet again within the language. His words have a comet-tail of reference and nuance’.

For Twm Morys, English versions of such poems ‘lose so much in translation as to make the effort almost worthless, like passing round a bottle of non-alcoholic wine.

Whenever I’ve seen pieces of mine in English, I’ve only dimly recognised them, like friends who’ve been in some terrible accident’.

This is a trenchant stand. Twm Morys’s manifesto might well be adopted by others. He concludes: ‘I feel that poetry is a discourse, sometimes with oneself, sometimes with others. When I have occasionally wanted to reach an audience that doesn’t speak Welsh, I’ve written in English. Otherwise I write in Welsh because I’m speaking with other Welsh-speaking people. If others would like to join in, well they can bloody well learn the language! The vast English-speaking world will be

none the poorer for not being able to read the cywyddau of Twm Morys.

But the little Welsh world, in my opinion, keeps a little more of its integrity if one or two of us elect to live out on the Graig Lwyd with Llywelyn ap y Moel.’

This is where romanticism and realism combine. But the concepts of the ‘last stand’ and the ‘last bastion’ are hardly new in Welsh literature.

Emyr Lewis (1957-), is another cynghanedd master. His work ranges from elegies in strict metres for local citizens – thus performing a historic bardic role – to modern evocations of city life and our televised wars: yn gudyll ifanc uwch Argoed Llwyfain profais ddyfodol y byd, hogiau’n marw drwy drais a damwain llygaid dall a gwefusau mud, ffroenais eu braw ar yr awel filain, tafodais eu gwaed ar y gwynt o’r dwyrain a gwelais drwy’r oesoedd lawer celain, brodyr a brodyr ynghyd.

From ‘Taliesin’ (Chwarae Mig, Hide and Seek,1995)

A sparrowhawk, soaring, I saw Argoed’s English auguries and so predicted an army of days, suns’ pale faces above shields’ black rims, an empire built of empty eyes and mouths, and I felt a wind cold as the corpse-skin of our brotherhood.

From the translation of ‘Taliesin’ by Robert Minhinnick (The Adulterer’s Tongue, 2003)

Emyr Lewis agrees with the assertion that this poetry is untranslatable.

But he sees the value of attempts at English poetry based on his originals; poems that have grown from the Welsh yet have an individual resonance. Here he’s in agreement

Twm Morys (1961-) was born in Oxford and brought up in Gwynedd and Breconshire.

One of Wales’s most intriguing literary figures, Twm Morys also writes for television and radio, as well as lyrics, which he sings with his folk-rock group, Bob Delyn a’r Ebillion. After graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, he has worked for BBC Radio Cymru and as a lecturer at Rennes University. In addition to two volumes of poetry, Twm Morys has written an important body of essays as columnist for various literary reviews. The son of the writer Jan Morris, he has collaborated with her on the two volumes, Wales, the First Place (Random House, 1982) and A Machynlleth Triad / Triawd Machynlleth (Penguin, 1994). Ein Llyw Cyntaf (Gomer, 2001) is his Welsh adaptation of Jan Morris’s novel Our First Leader.

Selected publications poetry Ofn fy Het (Afraid of My Hat, Barddas, 1995) 2 (Barddas, 2002) prose Grwyne Fawr, in the series Y Man a’r Lle (Grwyne Fawr, in the series Places, Gwasg Gregynog, 1998)

Selected translations Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) France: La ligne noire des montagnes (Festival de Douarnenez, 1998) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) USA: The EmLit Project (Brunel University Press, 2003)

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42 Gwyneth Lewis (1959-) was born in Cardiff. She is one of the leading poetic voices of contemporary Wales, and unusually, writes in both Welsh and English. After attending a bilingual school, she read English at Cambridge. She went on to Harvard and Columbia and worked as a freelance journalist in New York.

On her return to Britain, she worked in television. In 2001 she was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to sail to ports linked historically with her native city, Cardiff. She has been short-listed for the Forward Prize for First Best Collection and Best Collection, has won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2001, the Arts Council of Wales’ Book of the Year award.

Selected publications poetry Sonedau Redsa (Redsa’s Sonnets, Gomer, 1990) Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995) Cyfrif Un ac Un yn Dri (Counting One, and One is Three, Barddas, 1996) Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe, 1998) Y Llofrudd Iaith (The Language Murderer, Barddas, 1999) Keeping Mum (Bloodaxe, 2003) non-fiction Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (Flamingo, 2002)

Selected translations Catalunya: Paràboles i faxos (Columna, 1995) UK: Modern Poetry in Translation, No. 7 (Spring, 1995)

USA: Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (New Native Press, 1997) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) UK: Oxygen: beirdd newydd o gymru / new poets from wales (Seren, 2000) Italy: Gwyneth Lewis: Ventriloqua della distanza (Mobydick, 2001) Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003) UK: The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: A Facing-Text Anthology (Carcanet, 2003) Netherlands: Zonnen in de Regen (Uitgeverni Nieuwezijds, 2004)

with Iwan Llwyd (1957-), another musician, who views interpretations of his Welsh poetry as healthy and natural. Translation to these writers does not have to lead to colonisation or appropriation. ‘Why shouldn’t one poem ‘seed’ another?’, he asks. This happens in music, with its improvisational possibilities, all the time. Of the same generation, Gwyneth Lewis (1959-), unusually, has made her mark as a poet writing in Welsh and in English. She has also translated her own work, and sometimes creates new poems on the same subject in the process.

Her latest volume, Keeping Mum (2003) includes poems, for example, which are essentially new poems in English inspired by her original Welsh-language poems in Y Llofrudd Iaith (The Language Murderer, 1999).

Until recently cynghanedd was almost entirely a male preserve.

Indeed, for certain critics, it was not so much a craft that required years of apprenticeship, a value system, an unassailable cultural redoubt, as another Welsh sacred cow, linguistic Lego, trainspotterish enthusiasm for men in clubs and competitions.

Then, in 2001, Mererid Hopwood (1964-) became the first woman winner of the Chair at the National Eisteddfod with a poem that showed her own mastery of cynghanedd.

Renewal of interest in the ancient (and modern) sonic possibilities of Welsh-language poetry is certain to continue. For the poet Bobi Jones, understanding cynghanedd ensures a taste ‘of the full reading process as a relationship between signs and significance’. To him it is a tragedy

Emyr Lewis (1957-) was born in London and brought up in Cardiff. He read English at Cambridge before studying Law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He currently works as a lawyer in Cardiff and Swansea. Emyr Lewis writes in both the strict and free metres and has won both Crown (awarded for a long poem in the free metres) and Chair (awarded for a poem in the strict traditional metres) at the National Eisteddfod. His work is often ironic and his subjects largely contemporary and urban.

Selected publications Chwarae Mig (Hide and Seek, Barddas, 1995)

Selected translations UK: Modern Poetry in Translation (Spring 1995) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) UK: Oxygen: beirdd newydd o gymru / new poets from wales (Seren, 2000) Bulgaria: Plamak: phsatelh ot yelc (Plamak, issue 3&4, 2002) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003) UK: The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: a facing-text anthology (Carcanet, 2003)

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45

Iwan Llwyd (1957-) was brought up near Conwy in north Wales and now lives in Tal-y-bont, Bangor. After graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with an MA in medieval poetry, he worked for a public relations company before becoming selfemployed. He performs his poetry widely, both in Wales and abroad, and also tours with the group Steve Eaves a’i Driawd, much influenced by blues and jazz, for which he plays bass guitar. In 1990, he was awarded the Crown at the National Eisteddfod – one of Wales’s most important poetry prizes, awarded for a long poem in the free metres.

‘that so many Welsh people miss out on it, suffering not only because of cultural deprivation […] which is criminal, but from not enjoying the thrill of being in the middle of a revival of our culture’.

Selected publications

In this intense literary milieu, Menna Elfyn takes an independent line. Certainly she does not like stereotypes. This is why she refuses to behave like a writer whose language is spoken by just over half a million people. Since the 1980s her poems have considered our shrinking world. For instance, the poet’s chance acquaintance with a New York taxi driver, a Hanoi translator, and friends of a murdered Sri Lankan author testify to her own part in the globalisation process. One of the poems in her most recent book, Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss (2001) is ‘Bloeddier i Bobloedd y Byd’ (Let the Peoples of the World Shout):

Sonedau Bore Sadwrn (Saturday Morning Sonnets, Y Lolfa, 1981) Dan Anasthetig (Under Anaesthetic, Gwasg Taf, 1987) Dan fy Ngwynt (Under My Breath, Gwasg Taf, 1992) Dan Ddylanwad (Under Influence, Gwasg Taf, 1997) , Be di Blwyddyn Rhwng Ffrindia (What’s a Year between Friends, Gwasg Taf, 2003)

Selected translations Valencia: Poesia Gallesa Actual (Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, 1992) UK: Modern Poetry in Translation, No.7 (Spring, 1995) USA: Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (New Native Press, 1997) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) UK: Oxygen: beirdd newydd o gymru / new poets from wales (Seren, 2000) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phsatelh ot yelc (Plamak, issue 3&4, 2002) Italy: Iwan Llwyd; Da Bangor a Bangor: il viaggio di un bardo (Mobydick, 2003) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003) UK: The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: a facing-text anthology (Carcanet, 2003)

No-one interested in the glories of European culture should be ignorant of cynghanedd’s existence. For those who wish to know more of what this astonishing poetry might sound like, my advice is to attend any of the numerous readings in Wales by Mererid Hopwood, Twm Morys, Emyr Lewis, Iwan Llwyd, Myrddin ap Dafydd and many others, especially at the National Eisteddfod, which takes place in the first week of August every year. Several of these writers also perform their work at festivals in Europe and beyond.

…bydded i bob un o genhedloedd byd ddysgu iaith esgymun ei gymydog. …let each of the world’s peoples learn the excommunicated language of its neighbour.

‘Bloeddier i Bobloedd y Byd’, Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss (2001), trans. Joseph Clancy

Critics will point out that the problems of Menna Elfyn’s own native language stem from the processes of globalisation, and that few of the world’s peoples will care what happens in Wales. The fact that she publishes her original Welsh with facing-page English translations, and that some of her books come from an English publisher, are seen by some as an inevitable contribution to language decline. For a few, it is a form of heresy. Or betrayal.

Menna Elfyn is primarily a poet, but she also writes drama, libretti, novels and polemics. She has been described by one of her translators, Anthony Conran, as the first Welsh language poet for fifteen hundred years to make a serious attempt at getting her work known outside Wales. Indeed, with her bilingual volumes Eucalyptus, Cell Angel and Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss, the latter two published by Bloodaxe in England, she has set a daring and highly controversial precedent for making her poems simultaneously available in both Welsh and English.

Mererid Hopwood (1964-) was born in Cardiff. After periods abroad in Spain and Germany she embarked on an academic career, first in London then in the German department at the University of Wales, Swansea. She went on to work as a regional director for the Arts Council of Wales, before leaving to work as a freelance writer.

Hopwood came to prominence as a poet when she became the first woman to win the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in 2001, a high-profile prize awarded every year for a long poem in the strict traditional metres.

She went on to win the Crown, for a long poem in the free metres in 2003. She is also an accomplished translator, mainly working between German and Welsh.

Selected publications Cyfansoddiadau’r Eisteddfod Genedlaethol 2001 Cyfansoddiadau’r Eisteddfod Genedlaethol 2003

Selected translations UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003)

46 Menna Elfyn (1951-) lives in the south-west of Wales and is a professional writer and university teacher. She is one of Wales’s best known Welshlanguage poets abroad. In 2003, she was short-listed for the Evelyn Encelot European Prize for women poets. In addition to her poetry, she has also written plays, libretti, and for children. Prior to the publications listed below, she published seven collections of poetry in Welsh. In 2003, she co-edited with John Rowlands The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry: twentiethcentury Welsh-language poetry in translation. She travels the world giving readings, and her poems have been translated into many languages.

Selected publications Eucalyptus (Gomer, 1995) Cell Angel (Bloodaxe, 1996) Cusan Dyn Dall/Blind Man’s Kiss (Bloodaxe, 2001)

Selected translations Valencia: Poesia Gallesa Actual (Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, 1992) UK: Modern Poetry in Translation, No.7 (Spring 1995) USA: Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (New Native Press, 1997) Italy: Angelo di Cella (Ripostes, 1999) Italy: I Nuovi Bardi (Mobydick, 2000) Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phsatelh ot yelc (Plamak, issue 3&4, 2002) UK: The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2003) UK: The Adulterer’s Tongue. Six Welsh Poets: a facing-text anthology (Carcanet, 2003)

Such a development was almost inevitable. A first language Welsh speaker, Menna Elfyn’s material from the onset included the political and international. She was politicised by the Welsh language itself. Causes she espoused included women’s rights, apartheid in South Africa and nuclear disarmament. In 2003 she published the children’s novel Rana Rebel (Rana the Rebel) about the life of a fifteen year-old girl, ‘a rebel to the core’, living a soldier’s life.

Proceeds from the book go to an aid project for Palestinian children.

In the last decade, Menna Elfyn has become the most widely travelled of all Welsh writers, visiting and writing about Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Mexico, North America and most European countries. She has worked for the Disney Corporation in New York, collaborating with modern classical composers. In all of this she has proved a role model for other writers, especially women. It is not fanciful to suggest that women might have been seen as a threat to a naturally perpetuating, overwhelmingly male Welsh literary establishment. Menna Elfyn was perceived to be writing about subjects that had rarely been addressed by poets in Welsh. Rules were being broken. This role, and characterisation, might not displease the poet.

Her best work is found in the Bloodaxe volumes mentioned above, and in newer pieces in which wry and private meditations on subjects such as her daughter’s choice of jewellery are expanded to become poems on time and the inevitability of change. These poems are skilful

combinations of light and dark, where points of serious irony are never far away. They might be compared to etchings that include high-definition realistic detail against sometimes sombrely shaded backgrounds.

Yet undeniably grounding her poetry is a sense of continuity with the past, and an acute awareness of modern life in pressurised Welsh-speaking communities. There is also an almost unwilling, sometimes idiosyncratic religious faith. For instance, she describes her father’s miniature communion vessels which he used when visiting sick parishioners. As a child, the poet toyed with these like a dolls’ house tea set. This is a typical Menna Elfyn image, one that courts criticism, whilst being simultaneously spiritually playful and self-deprecating.

The above writers – with a host of others – exhilaratingly demonstrate that poetry in Welsh today constitutes a hugely various world, ranging from free verse to strict metres, often excitingly combining the two. Here is ‘a live tradition’ indeed, rooted and shape-shifting by turns, honouring the past, but celebrating what it means to be alive, right here, right now.

49 A TEEMING WORLD Recent English-language Poetry

Profiles 51 Dannie Abse 52 Stephen Knight 53 Sheenagh Pugh 54 Gillian Clarke 56 John Barnie 57 Peter Finch 58 Lloyd Robson 59 Tony Curtis 60 Owen Sheers 61 Samantha WynneRhydderch

51 If poetry in Welsh is the root of our culture, poetry written in English by Welsh people is a late response to, and a product of, industrialisation.

Today English-language poetry in Wales is a teeming world. Yet although they constitute twin hemispheres of the same globe, there is little crossover between the two poetries. However, two recent publications, my own translations into English of six contemporary Welsh-language writers, The Adulterer’s Tongue (2003), and The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) might help create a new integration and mutual awareness. That awareness, on a more profound, indeed instinctive level, is already found in the work of Gwyneth Lewis1, a unique figure who publishes alternate books of poetry in English and Welsh.

They say that language develops in infants as the baby finds itself alone and calls out for its absent mother.

At its very root then, language is about needing your mother and about responding to your desolation without her […] A truly bilingual person has not one mother tongue, but two.

Welsh was my blood mother, English my step-mother…

Lewis’s achievement in creating poetry of quality in the two languages complicates a fraught linguistic debate. In fact, she has tough things to say about the future of Welsh. Her home village, once a bastion of the language, is today so infiltrated by non Welsh-speaking incomers that its immemorial character is endangered. And this is the theme for her third volume in Welsh, Y Llofrudd Iaith (1999), literally ‘the language murderer’, a volume of poetry set out as forensic criminal investigation. The language is personified as an elderly native speaker haemorrhaging on her deathbed. These ‘final minutes’ are horrific:

‘Her End’, Keeping Mum (2003)

‘Roedd y diwedd yn erchyll. Torrodd argae tu mewn ac roedd gwaed ym mhobman. Allan o’i cheg daeth rhaeadrau o eiriau da yw dant i atal tafod, gogoniannau’r Tad mewn blodau ysgarlad – yn Abercuawg yd ganant gogau… – roedd y gwaed yn ddu, llawn biswail, yn ffynnon a’n synnodd ni , â’i hidiomau – bola’n holi, ble mae ngheg? – […] ac er gwaetha’n hymdrechion, erbyn y wawr roedd y gwaedlif yn pallu, ei gwefusau’n wyn ac ambell ddiferyn yn tasgu. Yna dim.’

‘Y Munudau Olaf’ (The Last Minutes), Y Llofrudd Iaith (The Language Murderer, 1999)

Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression (2002)

Writing in both Welsh and English, the profile for Gwyneth Lewis can be found on page 42 in the chapter on Welsh language poetry.

1

‘The end was dreadful. Inside, a dam burst and blood was everywhere. Out of her mouth came torrents of words, da yw dant i atal tafod, gogoniannau’r Tad in scarlet flowers – yn Abercuawg yd ganant gogau – the blood was black, full of filth, a well that amazed , with its vivid idioms – bola’n holi ble mae ngheg? – […] and, in spite of our efforts, in the grey of dawn the haemorrhage ended, her lips were white, the odd drop splashing. Then she was gone.’

Reams have been written about language loss, but little as shocking as this. We witness the convulsion; eavesdrop on the death-rattle.

Portrayed as ‘detective’ work, these poems, both originals and Lewis’s own translations, constitute deliberately melodramatic writing.

Political noir.

But Welsh plays little part in the lives of many English-language poets. For years their world has been partly and ironically dominated from England

by Dannie Abse. Jewish, Welsh, metropolitan, international, Abse has always been viewed ambivalently by his fellows. Somehow Abse has never fitted in. This is because his work has been too rich and his origins too complicated to define.

One critic, writing in 1984 of the late 1950s, described Abse ‘as by this time cosmopolitan, apparently lost in London’.

What this says about Wales is not flattering. Until recently, cosmopolitanism was often regarded as some kind of Welsh artistic prostitution. And I doubt whether Abse ever feels he was lost. London, after all, is two hours by train from Cardiff. What the critic means is that Dannie Abse was not perceived as part of that ‘imagined’ Wales, determined to be a world different from England, and prepared to evoke myth to prove such difference if it could not rely on history or language to make the point. Abse’s work shows he has never sought a place for himself in that Welsh construct.

Dannie Abse (1923-), Wales’s best known living poet, was born in Cardiff to Jewish parents. Between 1954 and 1989 he worked as a specialist in a London chest clinic. Dying in modern urban society is a recurrent theme in his work, as are love and the tensions which social convention creates in the life of the individual and the artist. The author of fiction as well as poetry, his most recent prose work is a novel set in 1950s London, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002), long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Selected publications poetry Selected Poems (Penguin, 1994) New and Collected Poems 1948-2002 (Hutchinson, 2003) fiction Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (Hutchinson, 1954) There was a Young Man from Cardiff (Seren, 1991) The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (Robson Books, 2002) autobiography Goodbye, Twentieth Century (Pimlico, 2001) miscellaneous Intermittent Journals (Seren, 1994) The Two Roads Taken (Enitharmon, 2003) theatre The View from Row G: Three Plays (Seren, 1990)

Selected translations & foreign editions Sweden: Aska på en ung mans ärm (Gebers, 1956) Italy: I dilemmi della medicina (Rizzoli, 1967) Germany: Asche an eines jungen Mannes Ärmel (Reclam, 1991) Belgium: Poésie des Régions d’Europe: pays de Galles (Revue de la Maison de la Poésie, Namur, 1994) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: Assemblea di Poeti (Mobydick, 1998) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002) Italy: C’era due volte (Mobydick, 2003) Italy: Undici poesie (Trauben, 2004)

Forthcoming translations Poland: Stetoskop (Znak, 2004)

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52 Stephen Knight (1960-) was born in Swansea on the coast of south Wales. He studied at Jesus College, Oxford. In 1992 he won the National Poetry Competition and went on to publish his first collection in 1993. His poetry has been described as more anonymous and cosmopolitan in feel relative to the work of his contemporaries in Wales.

Mr Schnitzel (2000), his first novel, is one of the most distinctive English-language novels published in recent years. He lives in London where he teaches creative writing at several universities.

Selected publications poetry Flowering Limbs (Bloodaxe, 1993) The Sandfields Baudelaire (Smith/Doorstop Books, 1996) Dream City Cinema (Bloodaxe, 1996) Sardines and other poems (Young Picador, 2004) fiction Mr Schnitzel (Viking, 2000)

Selected translations & foreign editions Sweden: Ny Brittisk Poesi (Lyrikvännen/Pequod, 1996) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002)

Typically, he brings the Jewish and the medical together in ‘Case History’. This tells of a patient with virulent political opinions: When I palpitated his liver I felt the soft liver of Goering; when I lifted my stethoscope I heard the heartbeats of Himmler; when I read his encephalograph I thought, ‘Sieg heil, mein Führer.’

‘Case History’, Selected Poems (1994)

The deceptive ease of the verse draws the reader into matters starkly terrifying, for there is violence in Dannie Abse’s writing. Yet this poet, true catcher in the wry, appears serene as he confronts his own mortality. But only his touch is light.

What move him are the obscene absurdities of Cold War paranoia, the ease with which the Holocaust was organised. Thus he has become a master at turning secondary experience into primary material.

Never histrionic, his poems are frequently rounded off by images that illuminate what has gone before yet make new progress: And the criminal, multi-coloured flash of an H-bomb is no more beautiful than an autopsy when the belly’s opened – to show cathedral windows never opened.

‘The Pathology of Colours’, Selected Poems (1994)

As a metropolitan, multi-genre writer, Abse has influenced Stephen Knight, another London-based Welshman. On the evidence of Mr Schnitzel (Viking, 2001), Knight may become one of the best of all Welsh novelists. An exploration of identity and roots, largely the author’s own, it is an ingenious creation of worlds

Sheenagh Pugh (1950-) lives in Cardiff. A Tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, she has published eleven volumes of poetry and two novels. She is also an accomplished translator, working from French, German and Ancient Greek into English. Pugh’s poetry finds some of its subject matter in mythology, history and in her travels to the islands of the north, such as Shetland and Iceland. Her poems are also witty and urbane, and give voice to what she calls ‘slightly weird and misplaced people’. Her main subject matter in recent years is the interface between reality and fiction. She has won numerous prizes, including the Forward Prize for poetry and the British Comparative Literature Association prize for translation.

Selected publications poetry Selected Poems (Seren, 1990) Stonelight (Seren, 1999) The Beautiful Lie (Seren, 2002) The Movement of Bodies (Seren, 2005) fiction Kirstie’s Witnesses (The Shetland Book Co., 1998) Folk Music (Seren, 1999)

Selected translations & foreign editions Belgium: Poésie des Régions d’Europe: pays de Galles (Revue de la Maison de la Poésie, Namur, 1994) Italy: Assemblea di Poeti (Mobydick, 1998) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002)

54 within worlds, a dazzling series of Russian dolls of prose, its style very different from the fomentary writing of other new novelists noted here.

Knight’s poetry, spread over two successful collections, is laconic in the Abse manner, and satisfying in the way his ability to coin the telling line broadens his themes. He seems a master of musical rhyme patterns, which helps make a personal poem such as ‘Daedalus’ available to all.

However, the reader will look in vain for such painful primary experience in Sheenagh Pugh’s poetry.

Confessionalism means nothing to her, unless it is admitting a liking for the look of a younger man: ‘I’m three times your age’. Sex, always implicit, can give her later work a much needed tension. She champions, almost as a gesture of defiance, the underdog, the unfashionable.

Her sympathies are profound, as in ‘Murderers Grow Old’:

Above all, Pugh admires those who know they are doomed, yet keep going. Hence her popular poems about ‘The Last Wolf in Scotland’, sailors marooned in Arctic ice, over-the-hill entertainers. Of late, she has discovered new subject matter surfing the Net, and in the timelessness of cable TV, trawling through channels like UK Gold or Granada Plus for heroes once familiar in our lives. Frankly, she makes poems about subjects some people think poets should ignore. It is ambitious to wish to be a popular poet, but also dangerous. One of the risks taken by Pugh is that her sympathy will become sentimentality.

But for a writer whose lines appear in places like the London underground and St. Petersburg subway, that is a price worth paying.

Dozing on benches, under the sun that shines On parks and prison exercise yards, and maybe their dreams are tormented with many deaths, or maybe just the one that haunts old men in parks, innocent of any crime, serving the same sentence.

Poetry Wales 38:2

Gillian Clarke (1937-) lives in Talgarreg, west Wales, an area with a high proportion of Welsh speakers. Between 1975 and 1984, she edited The Anglo-Welsh Review. Clarke has written about a variety of places and contexts, from Wales to Bosnia and the Mediterranean Coast, and more recently, war and terrorism, in her new volume, Making Beds for the Dead (2004). She is best known, however, as a poet of rural Wales, and for intuitive poems which draw on personal, familial subjects.

She sometimes weaves characteristics typical of Welsh-language poetry, such as the traditional strict metres, into her work.

Selected publications The King of Britain’s Daughter (Carcanet, 1993) Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1997) Five Fields (Carcanet, 1998) Making Beds for the Dead (Carcanet, 2004)

Selected translations & foreign editions Belgium: Poésie des Régions d’Europe: pays de Galles (Revue de la Maison de la Poésie, Namur, 1994) Czech Republic: Drak má dvojí jazyk (Periplum, 2000) Italy: Assemblea di Poeti (Mobydick, 1998) Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002)

56

57

John Barnie (1941-) was brought up in Abergavenny in rural south-east Wales. Poet, fiction writer and essayist, since 1990, he has edited the Welsh cultural magazine Planet. His poetry and fiction explore the border between human culture and the natural world.

He performs and plays (slide guitar) with the blues and poetry bands The Salubrious Rhythm Co and the bilingual group Y Bechgyn Drwg / The Bad Boys. His collection of essays, The King of Ashes, won a Welsh Arts Council Prize for Literature in 1990.

Peter Finch (1947-) was born in Cardiff. He has published over twenty volumes of poetry and made his mark as an experimental poet whose literary allegiances are with the sound and concrete experimentalists of the US, UK and the rest of Europe. Even today, Finch is a unique figure in the literatures of Wales, experimenting with tape, cut text and the internet and engaging with performance.

He has widened his canvas to include work in more traditional forms. He helped introduce new American and European poets to British readers in the seventies as editor of the ground breaking magazine, Second Aeon.

After twenty years as a bookseller he is now the Chief Executive of Academi, the national promotion agency for literature in Wales.

Selected publications poetry Lightning Country (Dangaroo, 1987) Heroes (Gomer, 1996) Ice (Gomer, 2001) At the Salt Hotel (Headland, 2003). fiction The Confirmation (Gomer, 1992) The City (Gomer, 1993) The Wine Bird (Gomer, 1998) non-fiction The King of Ashes (Gomer, 1989) Y Felan a Finnau (a history of the blues in Welsh, University of Wales Press, 1992) No Hiding Place (University of Wales Press, 1996).

Selected translations Galicia: ‘A Cidade’ in A Trabe de Ouro, 37, 1999.

Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002)

In 1965 the magazine Poetry Wales was founded by Meic Stephens.

Although the agenda was primarily literary, it at once became an arena for cultural and political nationalism.

Without an understanding of the older language, poets, rather dutifully it must be said, honoured it in English. Depictions of ‘exile’ from a Welsh way of life were popular, especially amongst those who earned a living outside Wales.

Therefore Gillian Clarke’s arrival as a fully-fledged poet who had served no apprenticeship was influential.

Readers suspected that Clarke wanted to see an independent Wales. But the politics was implicit rather than explicit in her best verse.

It is culture and people that move this poet, thus much of her work consists of naming and praising, with rural and domestic life her subjects.

Early poems such as ‘Burning Nettles’, ‘Blaen Cwrt’ and ‘The

Sundial’ remain amongst her best work, minutely observed, celebratory and elegaic by turns. Fittingly, she has been described as a ‘laureate of light’.

Owain was ill today. In the night He was delirious, shouting of lions In the sleepless heat. Today, dry And pale, he took a paper circle, Laid it on the grass which held it With curling fingers. In the still Centre he pushed the broken bean Stick, gathering twelve fragments Of stone, placed them at measured Distances. Then he crouched, slightly Trembling with fever, calculating The mathematics of sunshine.

‘The Sundial’, Collected Poems (1997)

Her own integration into life in the west Wales countryside has been mapped in recent books such as Five Fields (1998) and Making Beds for the Dead (2004). This is where her muse is happiest. Experimentation

Selected publications poetry Selected Poems (Seren, 1987) Useful (Seren, 1997) Antibodies (Stride, 1997) Food (Seren, 2000) non-fiction How to Publish Your Poetry (Allison & Busby, 1985; 1998) How to Publish Yourself (Allison & Busby, 1987; 1997) The Poetry Business (Seren, 1994) Real Cardiff (Seren, 2002) Real Cardiff #2 (Seren, 2004)

Selected translations & foreign editions Germany: Erkundungen: 28 walisische Erzähler (Volk und Welt, 1988) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001) Hungary: Vizet/Water (Konkrét Könyvek, 2003)

58

Lloyd Robson (1969-) lives in Cardiff and has developed a reputation for exhilarating poetry performances which experiment with the slang of his home city. His texts are often written as prose poems or in the form of stream-ofconsciousness diaries, and often spill over into typography, photography and visual art.

His most sustained work to date is Cardiff Cut (2001), a novelistic portrayal of the Welsh capital. Robson has toured widely, recently giving performances in Japan, Australia, Estonia, and the US. Selected publications Cardiff Cut (Parthian, 2001) Bbboing! and associated weirdness (Parthian, 2003)

Selected translations Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002) Japan: Gendaishi Techo, #4, 2003.

Japan: Midnight Press, #20, 2003.

Estonia: Looming magazine, 2004.

59 and urban themes do not suit this poet; her poems about Manchester, for example, where her English publisher was bombed by the IRA, are less sure than her ‘native’ work with its sensory richness.

However, ‘country’ and ‘domestic’ themes bring their own dangers.

One of these is predictability.

Clarke is famous for her ‘epic about housework’, ‘Letter from a Far Country’, and this is a successful poem. But another longer piece, ‘Cofiant’, reads as an act of duty, and duty for the English-writing Welsh is a dangerous concept.

They feel they have something to prove. Importantly, Gillian Clarke has been a bridge-builder between the languages, translating the poetry of Menna Elfyn and making a large contribution to The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003).

Another poet who translates from the Welsh, and like Clarke believes that good ‘political’ poetry is almost impossible, is John Barnie, whose latest work, interestingly experimental, might seem gloomy.

He deals with time, but is not much bothered by the chiming of his own body-clock. It is geological and sidereal time that Barnie celebrates, the processes that have built our planet, its multi-million year cycles of life and extinction. In fact extinction is a favoured subject, as if planetary engulfment by cold and dark, brought on by nuclear war or volcanic eruption might somehow be deserved. He anticipates such disaster rather fondly. In fact he is almost consoled by it. Modern technology for John Barnie is a

cul-de-sac into which humanity has blundered. Of course, there is a lighter side. He writes of alcohol and US blues-singers. But even here, his unremitting pessimism (he would call it realism) about the ‘machine culture’ we are forced to exist within, intrudes: ‘Blues and Texas-Mexican music’, he says, ‘those are among my “choices”, but they come out of a cultural situation where choice is meaningless, where the huge array of choice actually destroys meaning’.

Like John Barnie, Peter Finch is knowledgeable of Welsh, and is one of the few writers in the last century to have attempted macaronic verse. However, his influences and allegiances have lain outside Wales – with the sound and concrete experimentalists of the USA, UK and the rest of Europe. The magazine Second Aeon, which he edited in his early twenties, was international in scope. Even today Finch is a unique figure in the literatures of Wales, experimenting with tape, cut text and the internet to push Welsh poetry into areas it might otherwise refuse to go. In the last decade, however, Peter Finch has produced a body of more ‘conventional’ and highly personal work, dealing with relationships, Welsh topography, the history of Cardiff. This latter development can be found in Real Cardiff (2002) a kind of ‘Rough Guide to the Cardiff Imagination’, which reads as an antidote to the commodifiers of ‘Europe’s newest capital’.

Tony Curtis (1946-) was born in Caerfyrddin/Carmarthen in south-west Wales, and educated at the University of Wales, Swansea and Goddard College, Vermont. Curtis won the National Poetry Competition in 1984 and the Dylan Thomas Award in 1993.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1994, was made Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan. In his poetry, he often explores everyday subjects, such as family and place. In addition to his nine volumes of poetry to date, he has published several volumes on the visual arts in Wales.

Selected publications Selected Poems, 1970-1985 (Seren, 1986) Taken for Pearls (Seren, 1993) The War Voices (Seren, 1995) The Arches (Seren, 1999) Heaven’s Gate (Seren, 2001)

Selected translations & foreign editions Belgium: Poésie des Régions d’Europe: pays de Galles (Revue de la Maison de la Poésie, Namur, 1994) Italy: Assemblea di Poeti (Mobydick, 1998) Italy: Dal Confine (Mobydick, 2000) USA: Re-imagining Wales (The Literary Review, Winter 2001)

60 Owen Sheers (1974-) was born in Fiji, and brought up in London and Abergavenny, in rural south-east Wales. He read English at New College, Oxford before gaining an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. The winner of an Eric Gregory award and the Vogue Young Writer’s award in 1999, his debut collection, The Blue Book (Seren, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award in 2001. The Independent on Sunday named him as one of Britain’s Top Thirty young writers. He currently lives in London and the Lake District where he is Writer in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust.

Selected publications poetry The Blue Book (Seren, 2000) non-fiction The Dust Diaries (Faber & Faber, 2004)

Selected translations Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002) Slovakia: Ars Poetica (Oz Arz Poetica, 2003) Netherlands: Het Affrikaans Dagboek van Arthur Cripps (Ambos Anthos, 2004)

61 Until recently, Peter Finch’s experimental legacy looked thin.

However, Cardiff’s Lloyd Robson is a poet who has learned not only from Finch but 1950s America. Robson seems indigenous to the inner-city’s despoiled, language-fracturing environment, using its working class argot and energy to good effect. Some of his experiments might seem old-hat – cut-up texts or amphetamine-fuelled stream of consciousness poem-diaries. But these might be no bad things in a country with a conservative Englishlanguage tradition. His best work so far is found in Cardiff Cut (2001) – nocturnal, novelistic, built on long line and shattered narrative.

A better assimilated American influence can be seen in the early poems of Tony Curtis.

‘The Deerslayers’, typically based on a series of photographs, pulsates with energy. Curtis has also written finely-achieved later pieces such as ‘Soup’ and other historical ‘recreations’ tied to a theme of war.

Perhaps his best recent collection is The Arches (1999), in which almost surreal new developments enter his work, making what is by now habitual bourgeois realism richer and stranger. Curtis himself continues to be strongly influenced

by Dannie Abse, now aged 80, and this prompts the question, where are the younger English-language poets?

Looking around, we might point to Kathryn Grey and Zoe Briglëy, but most notable is Owen Sheers at thirty years old. Not young in the worlds of music, film or journalism, but dramatically so in English writing

in Wales, which has been more interested in doyens than youthful dervishes.

Sheers combines narrative with the skill to coin memorable images.

Certainly his prose is more powerful than travelogue, and he knows instinctively what to write about. For this reason his literary development could be exciting as a poeticallycharged travel writer. Born in Fiji, Sheers already possesses an appropriately global eye, and is a born traveller.

Restlessness or constant movement are exemplified by the Englishlanguage poetry of Gwyneth Lewis.

Critics have pointed out that language and travel for Lewis are linked sensory experiences: … – I shall taste the tang of travel on the atlas of my tongue – salt Poland, sour Denmark and sweet Vienna.

‘Pentecost’, Parables and Faxes (1995)

Language that becomes movement, which becomes change, and thus affords spiritual renewal, is one way of looking at her work.

Although sophisticated, Lewis’s poetry is deliciously particular. The reader will become aware, however, of what one critic has described as ‘the sense of disturbances behind the fluency of its language’. It is in her English-language poems that a reader best understands Lewis’s description of herself as ‘a religious poet’ – a realisation, she admits, that once came to her like a poem itself, and which affords some ‘relief’. Yet there is no religious guilt in her poems. Instead, they can be

light, playful and offer license to a migratory and sea-faring poet to skim her imagination like a pebble over the world’s surface.

But those personal ‘disturbances’ are never wholly absent. Perhaps for this reason it is illuminating to read Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch alongside Gwyneth Lewis because of the eroticism and undercurrents of harm in both writers’ work. Here is poetry shot through with anxiety, but Wynne-Rhydderch’s surrealism indicates a fresh voice.

If she can be compared with any previous Welsh writer, it might be Lynette Roberts, born in Buenos Aires, published by T. S. Eliot, who died in 1995 aged 86. But WynneRhydderch’s obsession is the sea.

It furnishes a cast of captains, capsized mariners, lighthouse keepers, beachcombers and harbour tavern drinkers. Some of this oceanic verse reads as if seen through a fairground mirror, revealing a prismatic world with no centre of gravity. But her poetry also cleverly targets men. Poems are webs in which she examines her trapped and writhing subjects. Men are viewed as specimens. Poor men, imprisoned in the poems’ silks; they fascinate because of their dullness.

Yet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s males become alarming once they step into uniform. Here is one of them, a medieval storm-trooper.

Absurd, deadly:

‘Paramilitary Lover’ He strokes my neck like the barrel of a rifle he might have killed that German with, his boots by the door, susceptible to the cold.

I glow by the fire in tandem with the rosewood dresser, impartial to flames, me with a passion for granite, him with his head shaved against the night, shedding his armour plate by plate.

I sleep under his shield, enfolded in an English flag I think will become my shroud. While I thrill among the lilies, placing a chestnut on the grate like a move in chess, I see the incentive of lace defeat artillery hands down.

Rockclimbing in Silk (2001)

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (1966-) comes from a seafaring family from Cei Newydd / New Quay, west Wales. She read Classics at Cambridge before gaining an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. With the publication of her first collection, Rockclimbing in Silk (2001), Wynne-Rhydderch’s reputation for a strikingly independent poetic voice was confirmed. Her work was highly commended in the 2002 Forward Anthology, and in 2003, she won the London Writers’ Award’s poetry prize.

Recent reading invitations include Paris, Cardiff, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Amsterdam and New York. She divides her time between Oxford and Cei Newydd.

Selected publications Stranded on Ithaka (pamphlet, Redbeck Press, 1998) Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001)

Selected translations Netherlands: In een ander licht (Wagner & Van Santen, 2001) Bulgaria: Plamak: phcatelh ot yelc (Plamak, 3&4, 2002)

63 Appendix

64 Rights 66 Publishers 67 Literary Magazines 67 Organisations

Rights Dannie Abse

Tony Curtis

Peter Finch

Stephen Knight

Robin Llywelyn

Samantha Wynne Rhydderch

Robert Kirby pfd, Drury House 34-43 Russell Street London WC2B 5HA, UK

Peter Finch 19 Southminster Road Roath Cardiff CF23 5AT Cymru/Wales, UK

poetry Stephen Knight 15 Gould Road Twickenham Middlesex TW2 6RN, UK

peter@peterfinch.co.uk

T +44 (0)20 8894 6563

Robin Llywelyn Dorlan Goch Minffordd Penrhyndeudraeth Gwynedd LL48 6ET Cymru/Wales, UK.

Samantha Wynne Rhydderch 62 Lizman’s Court Temple Road Oxford OX4 2HF, UK

www.pfd.co.uk

Mick Felton Seren 38-40 Nolton Street Bridgend CF31 3BN Cymru/Wales, UK mickfelton@seren-books.com

T +44 (0)20 7344 1000

T +44 (0)1656 663 018

www.peterfinch.co.uk

fiction Victoria Hobbs A.M. Heath & Co. 79 St. Martin’s Lane London WC2N 4RE, UK

rkirby@pfd.co.uk

F +44 (0)20 7836 9541

John Barnie John Barnie Greenfields Comins Coch Aberystwyth Ceredigion SY23 3ZZ Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)29 2049 3093

Lewis Davies Tuvia Fogel Il Caduceo Via Enrico Caruso 7 20133 Milano, Italy caduceo2002@hotmail.com

Stephen Edwards Rogers, Coleridge & White 20 Powis Mews London W11 1JN, UK

T +39 335 6175264

stephen@rcwlitagency.co.uk

Emyr Lewis

T +44 (0)20 7221 3717

Emyr Lewis Pen-clun Heol Rhyddwen Craig-cefn-parc Clydach Abertawe SA6 5RS Cymru/Wales, UK

john.barnie@planetmagazine.org.uk

Stevie Davies

T +44 (0)1970 611 377

Euan Thorneycroft Curtis Brown Haymarket House 28/29 Haymarket London SW17 4SP, UK

T +44 (0)1970 611 255

Desmond Barry Margaret Halton ICM 40 West 57th Street New York NY 10019, USA

euan@curtisbrown.co.uk

T +001 212 556 5600

The Blake Friedmann Agency Second Floor 122 Arlington Road London NW1 7HP, UK

F +001 212 556 5665

Sean Burke Martin Worthington Serpent’s Tail 4 Blackstock Mews London N4 2BT, UK martin@serpentstail.com www.serpentstail.com T +44 (0)20 7354 1949 F +44 (0)20 7704 6467

Duncan Bush Duncan Bush Godre Waun Oleu Brecon Road Ynyswen Penycae Powys SA9 1YY Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)20 7393 4412

Anna Davis

T +44 (0)20 7284 0408 F +44 (0)20 7284 0442

Martin Davis Garmon Gruffudd Y Lolfa Talybont Ceredigion SY24 5AP Cymru/Wales, UK garmon@ylolfa.com T +44 (0)1970 832 304

Menna Elfyn

T +44 (0)1639 730 652

Menna Elfyn Cysgod y Graig Stryd y Gwynt Llandysul Ceredigion SA44 4BH Cymru/Wales, UK

T +352 33 60 72

menna@elfyn.fsnet.co.uk

Gillian Clarke Carcanet Press Alliance House Cross Street Manchester M2 7AP, UK T +44 (0)161 834 8730 F +44 (0)161 832 0084

Niall Griffiths

T +44 (0)1559 362 122

F +44 (0)20 7229 9084

Mererid Hopwood Mererid Hopwood Lluest Wen Awel Tywi Llangynnwr Caerfyrddin SA31 2NL Cymru/Wales, UK hopwood@lluestwen.fsnet.co.uk T +44 (0)1267 236 015

Emyr Humphreys Vivien Green Sheil Land Associates Ltd The Basement 1 Doughty Street London WC1N 2LF, UK

T +44 (0)20 7836 4271 F +44 (0)20 7497 2561

emyracangharad@lineone.net T +44 (0)1792 845 251

Gwyneth Lewis Gwyneth Lewis 32 Waterloo Road Penylan Caerdydd CF23 5DZ Cymru/Wales, UK gl@gwynethlewis.com T +44 (0)29 2049 5107

vgreen@sheilland.co.uk

Alan Llwyd

T +44 (0)20 7405 9351

Alan Llwyd Pen-Rhiw 71 Ffordd Pentrepoeth Treforys Abertawe SA6 6AE Cymru/Wales, UK

F +44 (0)20 7831 2127

Bobi Jones Bobi Jones Tandderwen Heol Llanbadarn Aberystwyth SY23 IHB Ceredigion Cymru/Wales, UK T +44 (0)1970 623 603 F +44 (0)1970 623 603

alanllwyd@barddas.freeserve.co.uk T +44 (0)1792 792 829

Iwan Llwyd Iwan Llwyd Tai Newyddion Tal-y-bont Bangor Gwynedd LL57 3YB Cymru/Wales, UK iwan@llwydwilliams.freeserve.co.uk T +44 (0)1248 352 552

robin@portmeirion-village.com www.llywelyn.com T +44 (0)1766 770 294

Chris Meredith Christopher Meredith 9 Lôn Slwch Aberhonddu LD3 7RL Cymru/Wales, UK cmeredit@glam.ac.uk

sassy@rhydderch.com www.rhydderch.com T +44 (0)1865 401 720

Wiliam Owen Roberts Wiliam Owen Roberts 76 Pencisely Road Llandaf Caerdydd CF5 1DQ Cymru/Wales, UK wil.roberts@ntlworld.com T +44 (0)29 2021 2391

T +44 (0)1656 663 018 (Seren office)

Robert Minhinnick Robert Minhinnick 11 Park Avenue Porthcawl CF36 3EP Cymru/Wales, UK sustainablewales@btconnect.com T +44 (0)1656 783 405

Mihangel Morgan Mihangel Morgan Porth Ceri Talybont Ceredigion SY24 5ED Cymru/Wales, UK T +44 (0)1970 832 656

Twm Morys Twm Morys does not generally give permission for the translation of his work.

Angharad Price Bethan Mair Gomer Llandysul Ceredigion SA44 4QL Cymru/Wales, UK bethan@gomer.co.uk T +44 (0)1559 362 371

Sheenagh Pugh Sheenagh Pugh 4c Romilly Road Canton Cardiff CF5 1FH Cymru/Wales, UK sheenaghpugh@wildmail.com www.geocities.com/sheenaghpugh T +44 (0)29 2040 7499

Lloyd Robson Tuvia Fogel Il Caduceo Via Enrico Caruso 7 20133 Milano, Italy caduceo2002@hotmail.com T +39 335 6175264 www.lloydrobson.com

Owen Sheers Zoe Walde Rogers, Coleridge & White 20 Powis Mews London W11 1JN, UK zoew@rcwlitagency.co.uk T +44 (0)20 7221 3717 www.owensheers.co.uk

Angharad Tomos Garmon Gruffudd Y Lolfa Talybont Ceredigion SY24 5AP Cymru/Wales, UK garmon@ylolfa.com T +44 (0)1970 832 304

John Williams Rosie Buckman The Buckman Agency Ryman’s Cottages Little Tew Oxford OX7 4JJ, UK r.buckman@talk21.com T +44 (0)1608 683 677 F +44 (0)1608 683 449

Publishers Bloodaxe Books Contact: Peg Osterman Highgreen Tarset Northumberland NE48 1RP, UK

Gwasg Gomer Contact: Bethan Mair Llandysul Ceredigion SA44 4QL Cymru/Wales, UK

www.bloodaxebooks.com

bethan@gomer.co.uk

Parthian Contact: Richard Davies The Old Surgery Napier Street Aberteifi SA43 1ED Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)1434 240 500

www.gomer.co.uk

parthianbooks@yahoo.co.uk

F +44 (0)1434 240 505

T +44 (0)1559 362 371 F +44 (0)1559 363 758

Carcanet Contact: Michael Schmidt Alliance House Cross Street Manchester M2 7AP, UK

Literary magazines

opportunities through project programmes and funding schemes.

British Council Wales

Wales Arts International works in collaboration with a wealth of international and UK based partners, developing work in alliance with individual practitioners, arts organisations, cultural institutions and government bodies worldwide.

T +44 (0)29 2039 7346

www.parthianbooks.co.uk

New Welsh Review Contact: Francesca Rhydderch PO Box 170 Aberystwyth Ceredigion SY23 1WZ Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)1239 612 059

nwr@welshnet.co.uk

F +44 (0)1239 612 059

T +44 (0)1970 626 230

Wales Arts International is a partnership between the Arts Council of Wales and British Council Wales.

Planet Contact: John Barnie PO Box 44 Aberystwyth SY23 3ZZ Cymru/Wales, UK

Poetry Wales Contact: Robert Minhinnick 38-40 Nolton Street Bridgend CF31 3BN Cymru/Wales, UK

www.carcanet.co.uk

Gwasg Gregynog Gregynog Tregynon Y Drenewydd Powys SY16 3PW Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)161 834 8730

www.gregynogpress.co.uk

john.barnie@planetmagazine.org.uk

poetrywales@seren-books.com

F +44 (0)161 832 0084

T +44 (0)1686 650 625

www.planetmagazine.org.uk

www.poetrywales.co.uk

F +44 (0)1686 650 656

T +44 (0)1970 611 255

T +44 (0)1656 663 018

F +44 (0)1970 611 197

F +44 (0)1656 649 226

Seren Contact: Mick Felton 38-40 Nolton Street Bridgend CF31 3BN Cymru/Wales, UK

Taliesin Contact: Manon Rhys 3 Rhodfa Plasturton Pontcanna Caerdydd CF11 9HL Cymru/Wales, UK

pnr@carcanet.u-net.com

Cyhoeddiadau Barddas Contact: Alan Llwyd Pen-Rhiw 71 Ffordd Pentrepoeth Treforys Abertawe SA6 6AE Cymru/Wales, UK alanllwyd@barddas.freeserve.co.uk

Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru / University of Wales Press Contact: Ashley Drake 10 Rhodfa Columbus Maes Brigantîn Caerdydd CF10 4UP Cymru/Wales, UK

T +44 (0)1792 792 829

a.drake@press.wales.ac.uk www.uwp.ac.uk

Gwasg Dwyfor Uned 1/2 Iard Lorrys Caernarfon LL54 6DB Gwynedd Cymru/Wales, UK T +44 (0)1286 881 911 Gwasg Carreg Gwalch Contact: Myrddin ap Dafydd 12 Iard yr Orsaf Llanrwst LL26 0EH Dyffryn Conwy Cymru/Wales, UK llyfrau@carreg-gwalch.co.uk www.carreg-gwalch.co.uk T +44 (0)1492 642 031 F +44 (0)1492 641 502

T +44 (0)29 2049 6899 F +44 (0)29 2049 6108 Gwasg Taf 1 Gweithdai Bodedern Bodedern Caergybi Sir Fôn LL65 3TL Cymru/Wales, UK gwasgtaf@talk21.com T +44 (0)1407 741 466 F +44 (0)1407 741 466 Honno Welsh Women’s Press Contact: Lindsay Ashford Canolfan Merched y Wawr Stryd yr Efail Aberystwyth SY23 1JH Ceredigion Cymru/Wales, UK post@honno.co.uk www.honno.co.uk T +44 (0)1970 623 150 F +44 (0)1970 623 150

mickfelton@seren-books.com www.seren-books.com T +44 (0)1656 663 018 F +44 (0)1656 649 226 Y Lolfa Contact: Garmon Gruffudd Talybont Ceredigion SY24 5AP Cymru/Wales, UK garmon@ylolfa.com www.ylolfa.com T +44 (0)1970 832 304

manon@manonrhys.freeserve.co.uk T +(0)29 2047 2266 (Academi office) Barddas Contact: Alan Llwyd Pen-Rhiw 71 Ffordd Pentrepoeth Treforys Abertawe SA6 6AE Cymru/Wales, UK alanllwyd@barddas.freeserve.co.uk T +44 (0)1792 792 829

F +44 (0)1970 832 782

Organisations

T +44 (0)29 2038 3037 info@wai.org.uk www.wai.org.uk Welsh Literature Abroad Welsh Literature Abroad (WLA) is an agency funded by the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International to facilitate the translation of Wales’ literatures and to promote the literatures and writers of Wales internationally. Working with translators and publishers in Wales and overseas, WLA promotes the sale of translation rights, participates in international book fairs and international literature projects, and collaborates with festivals and events abroad to increase the profile of Welsh writing.

Publishers can apply for translation grants towards the cost of translating Welsh and English-language literary works into other languages.

T +44 (0) 1970 622 544 llcd-wla@llcd-wla.org www.welsh-lit-abroad.org

www.britishcouncil.org/wales Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru An annual event held at different locations in Wales each year, the Eisteddfod is a celebration of Welsh culture and is the largest popular festival of competitive music-making and poetry-writing in Europe.

T +44 (0)29 2076 3777 info@eisteddfod.org.uk www.eisteddfod.org.uk Gwales The Internet search and ordering service for Welsh and Welsh-interest books.

Contact: Marketing Department, Welsh Books Council T +44 (0)1970 624 151 wbc.marketing@wbc.org.uk www.gwales.com National Library of Wales The National Library is one of the great libraries of the world and its home is in the seaside town of Aberystwyth. Since 1911 it has enjoyed the right to collect, free of charge, a copy of every printed work published in Britain and Ireland.

T +44 (0)1970 632 800

Academi

holi@llgc.org.uk

Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. The Academi runs events, courses, competitions, conferences, tours by authors, lectures, international exchanges, readings, literary performances and festivals.

www.llgc.org.uk

T +44 (0)29 2047 2266

Wales Arts International

post@academi.org

Through the encouragement of projects and initiatives that enable international exchange and collaboration Wales Arts International aims to help build a dynamic international context to the arts in Wales.

www.academi.org

Wales Arts International works to support the promotion and development of professional practice across all artforms, providing information about the arts in Wales for cultural organisations and practitioners overseas and supporting international

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations.

The Arts Council of Wales The Arts Council of Wales is a public body with responsibility for funding and developing the arts in Wales.

T +44 (0)29 2037 6500 information@artswales.org.uk www.artswales.org.uk

Tˆy Newydd Tˆy Newydd is the National Writers’ Centre for Wales, which runs creative writing courses in English and Welsh for people at all levels of experience.

T +44 (0)1766 522 811 tynewydd@dial.pipex.com www.tynewydd.org Welsh Books Council The Welsh Books Council is a national body that provides a focus for the publishing industry in Wales.

Contact: Bridget Shine, International Marketing Officer T +44 (0)1970 624 151 castellbrychan@wbc.org.uk www.wbc.org.uk