Do we Welsh shine, out there on the world stage? We like to think we do. We have the history and the confidence. We’ve got two languages, a former world coal trade everyone remembers us for and a load of desirable mountains. They love us in California, in Cracow, in Calcutta, in Minsk.
But do they? Ask abroad what they know of our spanner-end shaped country and they’ll say Ryan Giggs then scratch their heads. After a while, if you are talking to an older person, they might say Dylan T, and then they’ll smile and tell you that they were so sorry to have heard about the death of our beautiful princess.
Ah, but what about Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones? Haven’t their names gone round the planet? Certainly. But as singers rather than Welsh ex-pats. And it’s only in the last decade that Shirl has started wearing a dress made from the Draig Goch.
R.S. Thomas, when he lived, was nominated for the Nobel Prize. Didn’t get it but was thought worthy. The world respected what he’d done. How many of our writers today are known well, even in England, never mind about further afield? Check off the list: Menna Elfyn, Owen Sheers, Gillian Clarke, Ken Follett, Sarah Waters, Gwyneth Lewis. Robert Minhinnick. John Williams. Niall Griffiths. Head scratching starts in earnest after that.
Why is this? Is our literature somehow less than perfect? Do we fail to hack it in the battle for world domination. Are the south Americans and the Turks ahead of us in the world literary order? It’s quite probable that they are. But that’s not through lack of talent. It’s the problem of identity that’s not working for Wales here. Ireland’s a nation. The Americans know that. So, too, is Scotland. The kilts sway among the pipe bands that march through New York. But Wales. What is that place? They don’t know. We don’t make enough noise.
Welsh literature is producing some of the best of world writing in the new twenty-first century. The novelists have never been so many and so active. The poets swarm. It’s as if we’ve been keeping all this creativity dry for decades and now decided to set the lot alight.
During the past year Jan Morris, Jon Gower, Philip Gross, Owen Sheers, Russell Celyn Jones, Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Malcolm Pryce, John Williams, Emyr Humphreys, Horatio Clare, Rhys Thomas, Byron Rogers and a dozen others have published humdingers. Get to your library and take them out. Catch up, know who we are. Buy at Waterstone’s or your local bookseller. Buying keeps the book world alive. Buying works from Wales keeps our identity flying.
Anyone in there you think we should nominate for a future Nobel? If you think there is then please let me know.
A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 13th March, 2010
Showing posts with label fame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fame. Show all posts
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Saturday, 5 December 2009
The Long Tale
Wales did not shine at the Booker. Sarah Waters, Pembrokeshire-born but somehow still separate from the Welsh literary community, did not win. I shouted for her. The Little Stranger could have given our rocking little country another winner. I talked it up. But in the end Hilary Mantel’s slice of Tudor passion beat Waters’ mid-twentieth century ghosts.
Getting onto the Booker short list can do a wonder for your sales. Get the judges to like you and a slovenly moving slab of literary fiction can be turned into a jet hot bestseller overnight.
The same kind of thing, albeit at a slightly less frenetic level, also happens with Wales’ own competitions. We may have fewer bookshops than England but ours have loyal audiences. Step up the Wales Book of the Year long list. Twenty books, ten in Welsh and ten in English, the best of our now burgeoning output, get selected each spring. They run the rapids towards a £10,000 prize awarded in high summer. Who got there last time? Deborah Kay Davies’ brilliantly written Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Wiliam Owen Roberts’ all-embracing Petrograd. Half of Wales has by now consumed those two examples of engaging fiction. The Wales Book of the Year Award is a solid indicator of quality. Want to find out who and how we are as a nation and enjoy yourself in the process? Read the complete long list.
Currently a new team of judges - John Gwilym Jones, Aled Lewis Evans and Branwen Gwyn in Welsh and Ian Gregson, James Hawes and Sara Edwards in English – are reading their way through hundreds of potential contenders. We are three quarters of the way through and even allowing for the fact that Christmas output has not yet hit the stands it’s looking as if it could be a bumper year.
Might our National Poet Gillian Clarke get there with her new collection, A Recipe for Water? Could John Barnie’s well-received Tales of the Shopocracy make the ten? Or Byron Rogers’ Me, Horatio Clare’s A Single Swallow, or even Sarah Waters near Booker, The Little Stranger?
In Welsh the choice is even tighter. Dafydd Islwyn, Robat Gruffudd, Alan Llwyd, Bobi Jones, and Fflur Dafydd all have books in the field. So too do two who normally battle it out on the English side – Jon Gower and Lloyd Jones. Jones won the Award for his novel in English in 2007.
The judges will by now be facing anew (for this team have never done it before) the same problems their predecessors did. How to compare a slim vol of poems with a 300 page slab of fiction? How can a serious literary study be compared with a racy street-wise novel? Watch this space.
A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 5 December, 2009
Getting onto the Booker short list can do a wonder for your sales. Get the judges to like you and a slovenly moving slab of literary fiction can be turned into a jet hot bestseller overnight.
The same kind of thing, albeit at a slightly less frenetic level, also happens with Wales’ own competitions. We may have fewer bookshops than England but ours have loyal audiences. Step up the Wales Book of the Year long list. Twenty books, ten in Welsh and ten in English, the best of our now burgeoning output, get selected each spring. They run the rapids towards a £10,000 prize awarded in high summer. Who got there last time? Deborah Kay Davies’ brilliantly written Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Wiliam Owen Roberts’ all-embracing Petrograd. Half of Wales has by now consumed those two examples of engaging fiction. The Wales Book of the Year Award is a solid indicator of quality. Want to find out who and how we are as a nation and enjoy yourself in the process? Read the complete long list.
Currently a new team of judges - John Gwilym Jones, Aled Lewis Evans and Branwen Gwyn in Welsh and Ian Gregson, James Hawes and Sara Edwards in English – are reading their way through hundreds of potential contenders. We are three quarters of the way through and even allowing for the fact that Christmas output has not yet hit the stands it’s looking as if it could be a bumper year.
Might our National Poet Gillian Clarke get there with her new collection, A Recipe for Water? Could John Barnie’s well-received Tales of the Shopocracy make the ten? Or Byron Rogers’ Me, Horatio Clare’s A Single Swallow, or even Sarah Waters near Booker, The Little Stranger?
In Welsh the choice is even tighter. Dafydd Islwyn, Robat Gruffudd, Alan Llwyd, Bobi Jones, and Fflur Dafydd all have books in the field. So too do two who normally battle it out on the English side – Jon Gower and Lloyd Jones. Jones won the Award for his novel in English in 2007.
The judges will by now be facing anew (for this team have never done it before) the same problems their predecessors did. How to compare a slim vol of poems with a 300 page slab of fiction? How can a serious literary study be compared with a racy street-wise novel? Watch this space.
A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 5 December, 2009
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