Welsh fiction's moment in the sun

The Guardian has a short feature on Welsh books (in English or translated into English) for cool kids - urban and hip rather than concerned with the loss of land, language and work. I've read most of them and have the rest on order, and will be teaching Freshers (originally Ffreshars) next year.

It's worth a read - non-metropolitan work doesn't often get a look in, thanks to the economics and cultural position of the publishing industry, but new perspectives are always interesting, whether you enjoy the books themselves or not.

Of Trezise's list, I'd recommend anything Niall Griffiths writes. He's interested in the Liverpool-North Wales diaspora and the consequences of community and cultural decay, which goes both ways, and is influenced by Irvine Welsh but I think he's got more depth. So Long, Hector Bebb is a brilliant, technicolor punch in the face (it's partly about boxing) of the dreary Chapel-obsessed moral novels and One Moonlight Night/Un Nos Ala Leuad follows Caradoc Evans in excavating the twisted horror underlying the Nonconformist rural Wales of postcard fame. I'd say that anything Gwyn Thomas (the novelist who described his work as 'Chekhov with chips', not the poet) wrote is stunning, and the same goes for Chris Meredith (men marooned in post-industrial Wales) and Wiliam Owen Roberts, whose experimental novel Y Pla or Pestilence unites medieval Wales and Vietnam to amazing effect. Y Pla has been translated into English and several other languages but his other novels haven't, which is a shame as he's such a brilliant exponent of what might be called postmodern writing.

I notice that these are mostly by men - accidentally. Wales is bursting with talented female writers - Catherine Merriman, Fflur Dafydd (a personal favourite), Menna Elfyn, Kate Roberts (who I think is one of the top ten writers of the twentieth century), Dorothy Edwards, Eiluned Lewis - and I've not even got on to the poetry.

Finally, if you want a laugh (with some suspense), try Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth series of noir parodies set in a twisted alternate Wales. Glorious.