Listicles and Welsh writers: a celebration

St. David's Day has just passed, and lots of newspapers with space to fill used it as an opportunity to create a canon of Welsh writers. Comparing the lists struck me as an interesting way into the papers' cultural perspectives and positions. Who knows, maybe there's a journal article in there?

Let's start with the Daily Telegraph, recently exposed as an arm of HSBC's PR department and generally understood to be a forthright but anti-intellectual conservative and Conservative publication. It picked 11 'great Welsh writers', presumably because they think Buzzfeed has somehow outlawed even numbers and made listicles compulsory.

1. Bertrand Russell
2. Kate Roberts
3. RS Thomas
4. Dylan Thomas
5. Roald Dahl
6. Dick Francis
7. Bernice Rubens
8. Gillian Clarke
9. Ken Follett
10. Sarah Waters
11. Owen Sheers.

Now I thought this an interesting set of choices. Bertrand Russell was an astounding philosopher, moralist, activist and very prolific author (I'm especially drawn to In Praise of Idleness), though not of fiction. Though deeply attached to Wales, better minds than me will be able to say whether there's a specifically Welsh dimension to his thinking. Is he a great writer rather than a great intellectual? I'm not sure.

I was thrilled to see Kate Roberts on the list: even in English translation her work is superb. She reminds me of Chekhov or even Marilynne Robinson: concise explorations of tightly-circumscribed lives (often of domestic labour or rural existence) which somehow encompass big philosophical questions. I'm certain that if she'd written in English she'd be world-famous. However, the Telegraph's account is oddly lacking:

KATE ROBERTS was one of the most significant Welsh-language authors of the 20th century. She was born in the village of Rhosgadfan, Caernarfonshire, and became known as Brenhines ein llên ("The queen of our literature"). Her childhood home Cae'r Gors – a Grade II listed quarryman's cottage – was taken over by Wales' heritage body Cadw in 2007, restored and turned into a heritage centre. She once wrote about her favourite Welsh childhood game "being five-stones", where you had to catch five stones in a shawl. The trick was finding a shiny pebble, she said.

It avoids almost any discussion of her work, making me wonder whether the author has actually read any.

Good to see RS Thomas on the list even though they concentrate on his grumpier side - a good excuse to publish yet again this wonderful photo of him. I recently reviewed his love poetry for Poetry Wales so promise you that there's more to him than troglodytic grump, but that was certainly his reputation amongst the English.

Dylan Thomas has to be on the list, though the Telegraph's account is restricted – somewhat predictably – to 'do not go gentle into that good night' and a couple of lines about his alcoholism. The next couple are surprising in a sense. Having worked on Welsh literature for more than fifteen years, I was surprised to see Dahl and Francis here. I knew the wonderful Roald Dahl was Norwegian-Welsh, but I've never seen him discussed as a Welsh writer, raising interesting questions about what qualifies one as a Welsh writer: residence, birth, language, subject matter, sensibility, self-identification? You'll get a different answer from everyone you ask, but the question never goes away: Richard Llewellyn wrote the most famous (and worst) Welsh mining novel in history (How Green Was My Valley) but continually fiddled with his CV to claim stronger Welsh roots than he actually possessed. Actually, I'm surprised he's not on the Telegraph's list. His politics would fit in with them very nicely: he advocated nuking Vietnam. Anyway, back to Dahl and Francis. I like Dahl's work but can't remember anything particularly Welsh about them, though I'm sure experts can correct me on that. It's tempting to claim, however, that the Gothic grotesquerie so prevalent in his novels echoes Arthur Machen, Dylan Thomas, Caradoc Evans, Gwyn Thomas, Rhys Davies and several other Welsh authors' works (see the brilliant Jane Aaron's book Welsh Gothic for more on this).

As to Dick Francis: he wrote rather repetitive crime thrillers set in the world of horse-racing. My Arthurian literature professor loved them in a shame-faced way: I met him in WH Smith once and he tried to conceal his purchases, before grandly announcing 'one cannot live on Arthurian literature alone, you know'. I was scared of him before that but rapidly grew to like him very much. Was Dick Francis a 'great', 'Welsh', 'writer'? Although his name featured on the covers, they were very much collaborative efforts, mostly with his wife and then with his son, though this was not really known until he died. I can't really say he was a 'great' writer: I love genre fiction and don't hold with snobbiness, but his stuff just isn't much cop. I'm guessing he's in this list because Telegraph readers like books about horses and posh people (or because the compiler was struggling to reach 11). They give the game away rather by not discussing any of his books, and finishing with this observation:

He would personally take the first copy of each of his books round to Clarence House to give to the Queen Mother. It was, he confessed, partly to spare her blushes that he never included scenes of explicit sex, though he once observed: "I'd be no good at that kind of thing anyway."

I feel the same way about Ken Follett's inclusion too. Yes, he wrote Fall of Giants which takes in a Welsh miner's family, and yes, his massive tomes are astonishingly well-researched and satisfying reads, but I can't help feeling he's in the list because he's sold a lot of books. I'm sorry to say that I think of him as a left(ish) version of Jeffrey Archer, mass-producing novels which reflect an unvarying world-view in a formulaic fashion, with terrible characterisation. Unlike Archer though, I think Follett's world-view is humane and intelligent.

Choices 7 and 8 are really rather wonderful to see. Gillian Clarke's a well-known poet, often found on school syllabi these days and little more needs to be said. But I totally agree with the Telegraph that Rubens 'deserves to be better known': despite winning the Booker in 1970 (so I know my friend Ben has read it anyway, because he's read every single Booker winner) and regularly publishing with reputable presses she's fallen down the memory hole through a combination (I suspect) of being Welsh, female and unsensationalist. The Library of Wales republished I Sent A Letter To My Love recently and I recommend it to you all: a tragic-comedy that starts out looking like it will be all tragedy and ends up pulling you between rueful tears and sadness without ever falling into sentiment.

Finally, we come to Sarah Waters and Owen Sheers. I've read all of Sarah Waters' novels. They're all thoughtful, often rip-roaring and mildly transgressive if you think lesbians are automatically thrilling, or fascinating assertions of lesbian presence in British history and culture if you're a bit more sophisticated. Welsh though? Waters is Welsh, but I can't think of anything else that makes her a 'Welsh writer'. Labels are difficult and suspect, but her output implies a primary identification as 'writer' and then 'lesbian writer' rather than 'Welsh writer'. If you're looking for a Welsh lesbian writer, you might profitably go back to Kate Roberts: though married to an alcoholic and closeted gay man, the recent biography Kate: Cofiant Kate Roberts ('Remembering Kate Roberts) and the associated documentary claimed that she may have been lesbian, though the jury is very much out (not that I'm particularly interested in psychoanalysing dead people: how people identified themselves, however complex, is far more progressive than deciding posthumously which team people played for).



Owen Sheers: OK, decent poet, wrote the interesting Resistance, but that novel annoyed me because Jan Morris's Our First Leader covered similar ground much more wittily and perhaps profoundly, and nobody ever mentions it.

So overall, a mixed bag for the Telegraph's choices. Some obvious ones, some left field ones considering their readers. Not a lot of analysis, but well done them for not doing the expected thing from a unionist, rightwing paper of ignoring the Welsh language, and for avoiding the usual nonsense about bards. The obvious absence is anything on industrial Wales. It's not keen on miners, apparently, nor apparently anything related to social class. Credit to it for positioning Dahl, Follett and Russell as Welsh, though it's a shame their accounts are too short and biographical to explain much about the authors' cultural positions.

So much for the Telegraph.  Let's have a look at the Irish Times's list. That it ran this feature isn't entirely unsurprising: the IT is the newspaper of record with all that entails. It can be very establishment, but it is also very self-consciously aware of its cultural responsibilities, which means that while it's obvious there's no money for global reporting, it's always had excellent coverage of literary and cultural matters. It also has the best letters page of any English-language newspaper in the world, for my money. So which authors are in the Irish Times Welsh canon, and how are they chosen?

There's much more context given in this list. As the primary newspaper of a (just about) bilingual Celtic nation, the Times is keen to stress the similarities in national self-definitions: 

Today is Saint David’s Day and in honour of our close neighbours, fellow Celts and rugby rivals, and to (hopefully) compensate for the coming despair which may be inflicted when the Irish take on Wales in Cardiff in two weeks’ time in this season’s Six Nations, we salute the writers of Wales, a beautiful country with a dramatic coastline and mysterious valleys, which has nurtured great poets, singers, storytellers, life celebrants from Gwyn Thomas to Max Boyce, and some pretty good rugby players.

I have to say that this bothers me slightly – Celticism is a much more complex and elastic term these days than this implies, and the rugby reference suggests a certain blokiness. As to Max Boyce… 'dated' doesn't cover it, though it's important to keep in mind that while the British expect everyone to know the fine details of their cultures (like Americans), Irish readers have plenty of other things going on and don't obsess over what the Brits are doing. Anyway, onwards.

This bit makes me a little bit sick:

The Welsh accent, lilting and melodic, possesses a rhythmic ease which makes it easy to see why singing and poetry is so much a part of the culture of Wales. Music and words; myth and story are second nature to the Welsh.

Honestly. It's the kind of thing imaginary stereotypical American tourists say about the Irish on St Stephen's Green before tripping off to Temple Bar for a half-pint of Guinness, some microwaved Authentic Irish Stew and a session by the Paddy's Ould Sod Trad Band then experiencing a Real Irish Shillelagh Mugging. Blarney of the worst sort, the kind of stuff that makes you want to maroon the author in Ponty on a Friday night. Just as in Ireland, there are multiple Welsh accents, and if you think they're all 'lilting', 'melodic' and poetic, you've obviously never been saluted with 'iawn gont' in Caernarfon of a Saturday night.

The piece is given this headline:

Dylan Thomas and so much more – a St David’s Day salute to Welsh writers
Eileen Battersby looks at and beyond the three great Thomases – Dylan, RS and Gwyn – to celebrate the rich literary tradition of our Celtic cousins.

OK, it plays on the 'limited surnames' stereotype, but the choices are interesting. Dylan is compulsory: he's basically got the Welsh Literature Figurehead job sewn up, despite having died in 1953 and being sui generis: his literary forebears and heirs are few and far between but that's OK because he's (mostly) so good. The emergence of RS as a persistent presence in these lists is interesting though. RS was a professional square peg – the Welsh language activist who wrote English poetry, the deist vicar, the serial stormer-out and the professional contradictor who could never see a consensus without wanting to upset it (he was also the unwitting star of a crisp packet PR campaign which shows you just how much respect England really has for its neighbours). There seems to be an unspoken agreement amongst metropolitan commentators that when it comes to the Welsh, their Literary Ambassadors should be poets, an echo perhaps of the Bardic history. Both RS and Dylan are interesting in these contexts too because while they seem classically Welsh, their literary and political meanings are fiercely contested at home, as the stand-up row during last year's Association for Welsh Writing conference about whether there should be a Dylan Thomas Day like Bloom's Day proved.

Certainly Eileen Battersby's account of DT is inflected by Bardism: the shooting star of a life packed into a short span, the difficult 'genius' and so on.

a wayward genius whose eloquent fury continues to beguile, excite and inspire… His voice and vision live on in those rare artists who appear to have been touched by an elusive element that could perhaps best be described as magic.

All true up to a point, but rather overselling the drama and soft-pedalling the hard graft of writing. Interestingly, Battersby's take on RS Thomas is more nuanced.

His poetry is cerebral and he has a metaphysical and political response to change and the destruction of the natural. Seamus Heaney had a huge regard for Thomas, the poet of clarity, who is one of the most rewarding of poets once a reader engages with the moral worth and linguistic precision.

Invoking Seamus is a good marketing technique: not only was he the foremost Irish poet of the last half-century or so, Heaney's work too found enormous scope in the narrowness of the small-holder's existence. I'm not sure what 'clarity' means here, though it could refer to Thomas's unflinching exposition of his own religious doubts and his contempt for his fellows' failures and weaknesses.

Top marks to the Irish Times for adding Gwyn Thomas to the list though, and not just because I wrote my PhD about him, amongst others. There are two Gwyn Thomas's, one of whom was an academic and poet who wrote in Welsh, and this one, who wrote scabrous and (initially at least) politically-engaged black comedies in English (his parents and the older of his 11 siblings spoke Welsh, and he enjoyed baiting the Welsh-language activists). GT described his work as 'Chekov with chips': his protagonists were trapped in dead-end valleys and dead-end professions, abandoned by a distant and hostile government. What makes his early work so stunning is that they know it and talk about it. They're all articulate, witty and analytical about their fates: read The Dark Philosophers or Sorrow for thy Sons. The later stuff is less interesting, I feel: too much light comedy. But when he's on form, he's really on form.

After that very male, very dead start, the Times list heads off in some very interesting directions: cultural theorist and occasional novelist Raymond Williams is recommended, alongside the excellent primarily-Welsh language Angharad Price, Trezza Azzopardi whose work injects a much needed dose of multiculturalism (and comedy) into the field, and Owen Martell, who is just a stone-cold genius in two languages (the over-talented git).

Having done so well, it's very disappointing that the Irish Times piece ends with a lazy bit of Celtic mythologising:

Simple question: why are Welsh writers so good? In common with all writers, they love language yet there is an additional quality, a playful feel for words. It is even in their spoken speech. Must be a Celtic thing.

Yes, there's a postcolonial school of thought that locates Irish and other colonised nations'  linguistic vivacity in the context of communities with at least a shadow of the native language informing speech, but this is terrible Celtic Twilight rubbish. Ugh ugh ugh.

Between the two of them, you get a fair sense of how Welsh literature is viewed outside its borders. Mostly white men, but with a tendency to overlook the majority Welsh lived experience (post-industrial, anglophone, urban) in favour of the rural. There's an undercurrent of bardic stereotype and a shadow of the Romantic vision of Wales as an alternative or other to industrial modern England which is a bit lazy but not unexpected.

The remaining question is: who else should be on the list? Actually: which ones would you exclude too? I'd add Lewis Jones (another victim of my PhD), Gwyneth Lewis, my friend Niall Griffiths, Wiliam Owen Roberts (his work is just superb and every website adds an extra 'l' to his name), Rachel Trezise's short stories, anything by Jon Gower (he interviewed me for a documentary on Caradoc Evans, then I read his short story collection and immediately made one of them the opening salvo in a chapter I've written for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Working-Class Fiction), Cynan Jones, Caradoc Evans (who really pissed people off), Iain Sinclair (yes he is Welsh) and Charlotte Williams's Sugar and Slate plus…well, I'd better stop. Canon-making is a terrible addiction and only leads to arguments. Thankfully, I'm off to the 2015 Welsh Writing conference in a couple of weeks and can have these arguments in person. You can too if you like…

PS. Maybe I've gone slightly overboard examining these lists, but I do find media coverage of literary matters interesting, especially when they're from outside the field. Do lists like this matter? Who now remembers the authors who outsold Dickens and Trollope? George du Maurier, Frances Trollope, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, William Clark Russell, Coventry Patmore, Marie Corelli or Dinah Craik other than nerds like me? 

Tuesday afternoon book news

Afternoon everybody. Hope you're enjoying the new improved Plashing Vole schedule (i.e. once a day rather than four times). I am. It's keeping my blood pressure down.

The book drought seems to be over: I've been buying a lot of second-hand stuff recently. The plan is to read them one day and then bequeath them to whichever resentful and unwilling relations answer the door to the courier the day after I die. What they do then with several lorry-loads of Marxist literary criticism, science fiction, experimental Welsh poetry and several generations' worth of children's fiction is entirely up to them. Mind you, given the rate of environmental destruction, my library will provide useful sustenance and shelter for our amphibian descendants.

In this week's pile is Robin Llywelyn's Seren Wen ar Gefndir Gwyn (White Star on a White Background) and From Empty Harbour to White Ocean, first released as O'r Harbwr Gwag i'r Cefnfor Gwyn. I've read White Star in English, and thought it was about time to get to grips with the original. Llywelyn is one of those authors massively disadvantaged by the English publishing industry's indifference to literature in other languages. Llywelyn is a massively talented experimental author whose work crosses generic and stylistic boundaries. He is, as far as any literary author goes, 'important'. (And if you get a taste for the hip young gunslingers of Welsh literature, go for Wiliam Owen Roberts too: mindblowingly good. His Y Pla is available in English as Pestilence though nothing else has been translated, damn it.

I've been catching up on Llywelyn because it's in the back of my mind to write something on Welsh literature (in both languages) and science fiction. Or more accurately, the lack of it. Llewelyn touches on fantasy themes and techniques occasionally, but there's not much SF by Welsh authors, in Welsh, or set in Wales. It's quite different in Scotland: there are lots of authors, my favourites being Iain M Banks and Ken MacLeod. They aren't just Scottish SF writers: Scotland has a future in their work. I'm only just starting to think about why Scotland and Wales differ. Both have small bourgeois classes and large working classes. Both are post-industrial economies and landscapes. Both have experience of being colonised and being colonialists. So you'd think there was space for Welsh authors to consider common SF tropes like imperialism, conquest, post-oil life, the end of Big Industry, environmentalism and so on. But it doesn't seem to have happened. One line of thought I'm playing with is that language is at the heart of it. Scots Gaelic is virtually dead and may as well be dead in the daily lives of its population outside a few small islands. So its authors don't have the lovely ghost of Gaelic culture seductively haunting them: one thing Scottish SF largely doesn't do is engage with Scottish mythology. Instead, Scotland starts either with the Union or with industrialism. In Wales, even non-Welsh speakers have learned it in school, see it on signs everywhere they go and hear Welsh spoken every day (in the North and West) and fairly frequently elsewhere. Welsh mythology is more available, and therefore perhaps fantasy is more attractive as a genre: the Mabinogion is always there to be plundered.

Language has another effect. Scottish SF writers have the world's English-language markets available to them. Dare I say it? Scottish culture isn't so different from post-industrial life around the Western World. Throw in an accent, a deep-friend Mars Bar, Walter Scott, respect for education and a tinge of nationalism and you've got a story replete with local colour without frightening the mass readership. For a Welsh-language author, you've got a very small readership. That leads to subsidy from various state bodies, most of whom don't like genre fiction. So you have to be a bit more self-consciously 'literary' and pay more attention to things an English readership largely doesn't care about, such as the fate of minority languages. There should be room for SF here (what are Cymdeithas yr Iaith if not a local affiliate of the Rebel Alliance fighting Eric Pickles' Evil Empire?), but it largely hasn't happened, with the exception of Islwyn Ffowc Elis. And of course hard SF depends on hard science, which is conducted and discussed in English. Translation from Welsh is expensive and English publishers don't give a damn, so the odds are stacked against Welsh SF. Anyway, this is all very random preliminary rambling: your thoughts welcome.

What else? Well, I've been buying more histories of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I don't really know why other than a homegrown version of Ostalgie. Many of them were rigid, authoritarian and humourless apologists for mass murder… and yet before it became a self-perpetuating and irrelevant cult more concerned with its own bureaucracy than fomenting a much-needed revolution, the Party represented a political idealism largely dissipated in our own age. Certainly other leftwing parties are an unpleasant stew of Stalinism and sexism: the SWP has recently attacked its own members as 'creeping feminists', which doesn't sound very progressive to me.

I've also launched into John Niven's scabrous, offensive and enormously funny satire The Second Coming, in which Jesus returns with the message 'be nice', only to discover that the only way to propagate it is to appear on a TV talent show. The only problem is, Jesus likes Slint, Mogwai, Pavement and Nirvana (and keeps telling people that 'God loves fags', to their enormous annoyance), while the show wants Billy Joel covers. Niven's targets are perhaps too wide: I'm not sure raging against Christian, Muslims and a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell isn't too scattergun, but it's an entertaining read. After that, it's time for Jakob Arjouni's near-future post-September 11th novel Chez Max, and George Saunders' short story collection Civilwarland in Bad Decline, which sounds like Ballard played for laughs.

So far this week I've taught Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and introduced Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Only two of the students had finished the Trollope (it is around 850 pages long) but we had a good introductory session on it. I don't usually teach such canonical texts but I have to admit that I'm enjoying reading and teaching them very much. Perhaps they're so unfashionable that they're no longer canonical and I'm on the radical, transgressive cutting edge by bringing them back in to the classroom! Paradise Lost tomorrow. The poem, not the dodgy 90s goth band. Though now I've mentioned them, I may as well play you a bit:

World Book Day News

It's both Dydd Dewi Sant / St. David's Day and World Book Day / Ddiwrnod y Llyfyr, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to point you in the direction of some interesting Welsh novels, in either language. I'll do poetry some other time, when I've got several weeks to list all the amazing Welsh poets. I've celebrated World Book Day. oddly, by not getting any books in the post at all, which is unheard of for me!

Joe Dunthorne, Submarine and Wild Abandon. I don't know if Dunthorne's Welsh, and I've not quite got to grips with the Dunthorne's version of Welshness (I'm wondering if there's a paper in it), but these two Bildungsromans are really good. Both follow confused, intelligent and quirky teenagers adrift in a sea of adult troubles as they try to navigate according to their own perceptions. Funny, very interesting narrative structures, very moving. Good novels make you see the world differently - Dunthorne and the other authors I mention do this beautifully.



One of my favourite authors of all is Wiliam Owen Roberts. He writes sinuous, experimental novels which slip between times, narrators and settings in a dialogical, polyphonic fashion. If you don't speak English, then you're limited to Pestilence, translated into ten languages after Y Pla revitalised Welsh literature with its Pynchonesque tale of colonial wars medieval and South-East Asian. Seriously, one of the best books I've ever read. In the middle of an awful lot of writers going on about industrial decline or domestic woes, Roberts takes the entire world and makes it his. The rest of the world desperately needs translations of his other novels, particularly his short stories on Thatcher's Britain, Hunangofiant.


Wiliam Owen Roberts from Wales Literature Exchange | Cyfn on Vimeo.


Kate Roberts: should have won a Nobel prize. Lived into her 90s, ran a printing firm, coped with a wayward husband, fought for Welsh-language education while writing short novels and stories which remind me of PJ Harvey's later albums: down to the bare rock. There are no wasted words in a Roberts story. Adjectives, descriptions, phatic conversations are all absent. Her characters are reduced to the essentials, much as they live their lives. They're gloomy in that twilit Protestant sense, but there's also a rock-ribbed determination about them which is admirable: there are no illusions in her work, just a clear-eyed assumption that endurance is all. Start with Traed Mewn Cyffion (translated as Feet in Chains) or for lighter material, Te Yn Y Grug (Tea in the Heather).

I'm a huge fan of Seren Books' New Stories from the Mabinogion series. The source material is deeply weird anyway, and they've got very hip authors to produce their own novelisations. There isn't a dud amongst them, but I'd start with Gwyneth Lewis's The Meat Tree, a postmodern SF version of the Blodeuwedd story (see also Alan Garner's terrifying The Owl Service), Horatio Clare's The Prince's Pen (tribal warfare plus jihad plus capitalism in decline) and Fflur Dafydd's The White Trail. Dafydd's work is generally brilliant: few people manage to combine a deep connection to Welsh cultural rootness with a lightness of literary touch.

Who else? I'm a massive fan of Chris Meredith's English poetry and novels: Sidereal Time slips easily between fantasy, dashed dreams and quotidian tedium beautifully, while Shifts lays bare the failure of stable masculinity as the South Wales valleys become post-industrial work-houses. Griffri is also a stunning novel. There's a new novel coming soon: The Book of Idiots, of which there's an extract in the current New Welsh Review.

And there's Niall Griffiths: the Welsh-Liverpudlian Irvine Welsh, interested in borders, subcultures and the lumpenproletariat - those marooned between cultures or living in a post-cultural twilight: Wreckage is a good place to start, and I love Grits too.

Amongst the established and dead authors, I will always rave about Gwyn Thomas's mordant, absurdist, utterly unique novels - particularly Sorry For The Sons, The Dark Philosophers and Where Did I Put My Pity?. I wrote my PhD partly on Sorrow, and reread it often. I also wrote about Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live, two mining-and-communism novels which have a reputation amongst friends and supporters alike of being 1930s proletarian propaganda. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG. Read them, come back to me and I'll tell you why. I intend to get into print in the near future to point out to Dai Smith and his mates exactly how WRONG they are.

Also highly recommended: Emyr Humphreys. Seemingly immortal novelist and poet in both languages. His classic is A Toy Epic and the Land of the Living series, but I'd recommend Outside the House of Baal and Old People Are A Problem for their conflation of subtle wit and profundity. I'd also point you in the direction of Raymond Williams of course, and Glyn Jones. I also rate Siân James' A Small Country, Menna Gallie's You're Welcome to Ulster, Gwyn Jones's work, Lloyd Jones, the incomparable psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, Owen Sheers to some extent, Jan Morris (huge soft spot for Our First Leader) and Catherine Merriman.

English people seem not to know much about Wales (I can see Wales from my office window, but one of my local students did not know it existed), and don't read enough literature in translation. So perhaps Welsh literature is a good place to start?

Llyfrau o Gymru

Yes, I've had two parcels of books from Wales today: the latest in Seren's wonderful 'new stories from the Mabinogion' series, Niall Griffiths' The Dreams of Max and Ronnie to add to the Gwyneth Lewis one which turned up last week. I also received 27 and 28 in the Library of Wales series, Margiad Evans's rural gothic Turf or Stone, and Hilda Vaughan's tale of ideologies clashing in the countryside, The Battle to the Weak, sensitively introduced by Fflur Dafydd.

I also got several very blunt e-mails from Amazon today - while I'm waiting for a new bank card, several orders have had payment refused, and they're very disappointed in me.

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.

Yet more books

The postman brought me:
Owen Sheers' White Ravens, a retelling in prose form of a tale from the ancient Welsh collection of myths Y Mabinogion.
In the same series, Russell Celyn Jones's The Ninth Wave, set in post-oil Wales. Both are published by Seren, and are beautifully designed.
Finally, another Nancy Mitford, The Blessing. Frothy fun.

Gissa job. Go on, gissa job.

Sweet - my new phone's here, and my Dublin sister has jacked in her unfulfilling job, a week after my brother quit his for a new life as (cough) a lawyer, once he's done his conversion course. Add my newly unemployed New Zealand lawyer sister to the list and half my siblings are now scrounging dole scum, in the words of The League of Gentlemen. I, of course, am loving this. Having suffered the slings and arrows of these career-minded chaps and chapesses while I did an English degree, an MA in Welsh writing and then a PhD (Masculinity in four 1930s political Welsh novels), now I'm the one with a career(ish)! The worm's turned, the world's turned upside down etc. etc. etc. The family are going to hear about this for a long time to come.

Having laboured over Mark's collection of journals for hours (Sewanee Review 1966-1977 anyone), I've been rewarded with some fine books: The Trial of Lady Chatterley, Doctorow's Ragtime and Ballard's The Day of Creation. Good job I'm not being thrown out of my office.

In my absence the cricket has turned from the habitual England mediocrity into a brave stand by Collingwood and Pietersen. At least Pietersen went in his standard way - trying to be too clever. My least favourite player.

(Post title is from The Boys from the Blackstuff)

Another day, another book

This time, it's Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints - partly a translation, partly a rewriting of her Welsh-language novel Atyniad. I bought it partly because I bumped into her at a conference or somewhere, while she was doing her PhD on R. S. Thomas (this book, like his Images of Bardsey) is set on Ynys Enlli, the Isle of 20,000 Saints), and partly because Welsh writing is going through another of its frequent golden ages - hip young things ripping up and remaking Cymru Cymraeg and English Wales in ever more fascinating ways, unbound by Celtic Twilightism or dour socialist realism and aided by forward-looking Eisteddfod judges.