Intermittent Photos No. 2: Author!

 I had home internet installed today. I hate it. I liked having a home space demarcated from work space by the absence of a technology that's sold as freedom but actually serves to ensure that work pervades domestic space and time in less ergonomic comfort…and at my own expense. 

However, it means I can resume the Intermittent Photos series without sitting on the pavement outside my actual office. Today's is very timely: it's from Niall Griffiths' professorial inaugural lecture here. He was for a too-short time our Prof of Creative Writing, and a very good one he was: generous, learned, encouraging and thoroughly disreputable, but also a prime example of an actually working author, with all the economic woes that entails these days. Niall was my suggestion: I think he's a genuinely great author, a deep thinker, and also a reminder that being creative means not conforming to the deadening ethos of professionalism and politeness. 

Niall's inaugural lecture horrified the puritanical, unintelligent Dean imposed on us in that dark time: he was scruffy, regional, unapologetic and didn't pretend to be humble when it came to talking about his art, which is exactly how a creative reader should be. His lecture was on Basil Bunting's poetry, and was a dazzling exposition of that semi-forgotten poet's genius. The only thing the Dean remembered from it was Niall's one swear-word. 

Niall's early work was pigeon-holed as Welsh Welsh: tales of the Welsh underclass in untranslated dialect: all true, but there's more going on there, at the political, artistic and structural levels. His work mostly deals with the legacies of border identities and generations of social damage: while Sheepshagger and Runt are shocking versions of naturalism, Wreckage is my favourite, a tale of two Welsh-Irish Liverpudlians on a crime spree across North Wales, interleaved with accounts of the immediate and historic atrocities that produced them. Niall thinks it's his worst novel but he's wrong. 

One of the books he wrote while our colleague was Broken Ghost, which won the Wales Book of the Year last week: there's a scene set in this fair city and I, and the department, are in the acknowledgements! It's a kind of transcendental bottom-dog Brexit novel, and yet far more moving and profound than that summary could communicate.