Literature of Wales (English language)
Encyclopedia
Anglo-Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English are terms used to describe works written in the English language
by Welsh writers. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language literature.
There is no final, clear definition of what constitutes a Welsh writer in English, or Anglo-Welsh author. Obviously it includes Welshmen whose first language is English, rather than Welsh, such as Swansea born Dylan Thomas
(1914–53) and novelist Emyr Humphreys
, born in Prestatyn in 1919. But it also includes those born outside Wales
with Welsh parentage, who were influenced by their Welsh roots, like London-born poet David Jones
(1895–1974). Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues defines the Anglo-Welsh as "those Welsh men and women who write in English about Wales" (p.37).
In addition, writers born outside Wales, who have both lived in as well as written about Wales, are often included, such as John Cowper Powys
(1872–1963), who settled in Wales in 1935 and wrote two major novels, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1949), that have Welsh subject matter. In addition to using Welsh history and settings, Powys also uses the mythology of The Mabinogion
. He also studied the Welsh language. Then there is the poet, teacher, and critic Jeremy Hooker
(born 1941), who taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1965–84 and became deeply involved in writing about and teaching Welsh writing in English during this time, though he wrote only a few poems with Welsh subject matter. The Liverpool-born novelist James Hanley (1897–1985) lived in Wales from 1931 until 1963 and was buried there, but only a few of his many works have Welsh subject matters. As one writer notes: "a widely debatable area of Anglo-Welsh acceptability exists". Saunders Lewis
, the noted Welsh-language poet, novelist, dramatist, and nationalist, in fact rejected the possibility of Anglo-Welsh literature, because of the use of the language of the British colonialists, affirming that '"the literature which people called Anglo-Welsh was indistinguishable from English literature".
discovered sixty-nine Welsh men and women who wrote in English prior to the twentieth century, Dafydd Johnston thinks it "debatable whether such writers belong to a recognisable Anglo-Welsh literature, as opposed to English literature in general".
While historically Welsh writing in English might be said to begin with the fifteenth-century bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal
, well into the nineteenth century English was spoken by few in Wales, and prior to the early twentieth century there are only three major Welsh-born writers who wrote in the English language: George Herbert
(1593–1633) from Montgomeryshire, Henry Vaughan
from Brecknockshire (1622–1695), and John Dyer
from Carmarthenshire (1699–1757). While some see them as clearly belonging to the English tradition, Belinda Humphrey believes that both Vaughan and Dyer are Anglo-Welsh poets because, unlike Herbert, they are "rooted creatively in the Welsh countryside of their birth". Furthermore she suggests in Vaughan's case the possible influence of the tradition of Welsh-language poetry.
The beginnings of an Anglo-Welsh tradition are found by some in the novels of Allen Raine
(Anne Adalisa (Evans) Puddicombe) (1836–1908), from Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, whose work, Stephen Knight proposes, "realised a real, if partial, separate identity and value for a Welsh social culture". (Other possible precursors are Monmouthshire-born Arthur Machen
(1863–1947), and Joseph Keating (1871–1934), who began his working life as a South Wales miner.) However, many see the Carmarthenshire-born satirical short-story writer and novelist Caradoc Evans
(1878–1945) as the first—or first modern—Welsh writer in English. His short-story collections My People (1915) and Capel Sion (1916) were highly controversial, and Roland Mathias bitterly comments that "No other Anglo-Welsh prose writer. .. displayed such ill will to Wales or to Welsh people". W. H. Davies
(1871–1940), born in Newport
, became famous principally for his The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
which was set mostly in North America. Although his poetry was typically inspired by Nature in general, some of his works, such as his 1918 "A Poet's Pilgrimage (or A Pilgrimage In Wales)" were set in his homeland. (See also Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844–89), Edward Thomas
(1878–1917) and Joseph Keating (1871–1934).)
To a large extent, though not entirely, "The first flowering of Welsh writing in English" was in industrial South Wales and this was linked to the rapid decline in the use of the Welsh language in the twentieth century, especially in this region. David Jones and Dylan Thomas are two writers of the 1930s who do not fit into this paradigm.
An early work of the first wave of Anglo-Welsh writers was The Withered Root (1927) by Rhys Davies
(1901–78) from the Rhondda Valley. While he probably wrote more fiction about the industrial world of the South Wales Valleys
than anyone else, Rhys Davies was in fact a grocer's son who was living in London by the time he was twenty. Unlike that of other writers from the mining community, his fiction is more concerned with individuals, in particular women, than with politics. D. H. Lawrence
was a major influence on Rhys, though similarities with Caradoc Evans have been noted, and it has been suggested that he had "The tendency to process images of the Welsh valleys for consumption by English audiences". Another Anglo-Welsh novelist (and playwright) was Jack Jones
(1884–1970), a miner's son from Merthyr Tydfil who was himself a miner from the age of 12. He was active in the union movement and politics, starting with the communist party, but in the course of his life he was involved, to some degree, with all the major British parties. Amongst his novels of working-class life are Rhondda Roundabout
(1935) and Bidden to the Feast (1938). The political development of a young miner is the subject of Cwmardy (1937), Lewis Jones
's (1897–1939) largely autobiographical novel. Gwyn Thomas
(1913–81) was also a coalminer's son from the Rhondda, but won a scholarship to Oxford and then became a schoolmaster. He wrote 11 novels as well as short stories, plays, and radio and television scripts, most of which focused on unemployment in the Rhondda Valley in the 1930s. He has been described by Stephen Knight as "about the most verbally brilliant writer of Welsh fiction in English". His inaugural novel Sorrow for Thy Sons (1937) was rejected by Gollancz and not published until 1986. Thomas's first accepted book was a collection of short stories, Where Did I Put My Pity: Folk-Tales From the Modern Welsh, which appeared in 1946. He was also known for his negative attitude to the Welsh language, and Glyn Jones sees him as falling "short of being a completely representative figure ... in his attitude to Wales and Welshness," as Gwyn Thomas "appears in his writing to have little sympathy with the national aspirations and indigenous culture of our country". Another writer who escaped from his proletarian background was Gwyn Jones
(1907–1999). He wrote about this world in novels and short stories, including Times Like These (1936) which explores the life of a working-class family during the 1926 miners' strike. Jones founded The Welsh Review in 1939, which he edited until 1948; this journal was important for raising discussion of Welsh issues. What is probably the most famous novel about Wales, Richard Llewellyn
's How Green Was My Valley
, was published in 1939. It is described by Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues as a "staggering and accomplished piece of literary hokum" (p.51), "a book [that Jones finds] impossible to take seriously, though much of it [he] read with absorption" (p.53). (See also Margiad Evans
[Peggy Whistler] (1909–58); Richard Hughes
(1900–76); Alexander Cordell
(1914–97).)
The mining valleys produced a significant working-class poet in Idris Davies
(1905–53), who worked as a coal miner before qualifying as a teacher. He initially wrote in Welsh "but rebellion against chapel religion", along with the "inspirational influence of English" poets, led him to write in English. Gwalia Deserta (1938) is about the Great Depression, while the subject of The Angry Summer (1943) is the 1926 miners' strike.
There are a number of other authors who published before the Second World War but who did not come from the South Wales valleys.
Amongst these was Swansea suburbanite Dylan Thomas
(1914–53), whose first collection, 18 Poems, was published in 1934. Then there is Geraint Goodwin
(1903–41) from Newtown in mid-Wales, who, in such works as the novel The Heyday in the Blood (1936), wrote about declining rural communities in the border region. David Jones
(1895–1974), whose father was from North Wales, was born in a London suburb. His epic poem In Parenthesis, which deals with his World War I experiences, was published in 1937. Another Swansea poet Vernon Watkins
(1906–67) likewise does not belong with the main group of writers of the so-called First Wave from the South Wales mining communities. Roland Mathias suggests that "his use of Welsh tradition was highly selective – only the ancient custom of the Mari Lwyd and the legend of Taliesin". Alun Lewis
(1915–44), from Cwmaman near Aberdare, published both poetry and short fiction and might well have been a major figure in the decades after the war but for his early death.
The Anglo-Welsh writers of the 1930s had to look to London for publication and the possibility of literary success; though gradually, beginning in 1937, Welsh writing in English received encouragement from Welsh-based literary and critical journals, initially Wales, published by Keidrych Rhys in three intermittent series between 1937 and 1960. Next came the Welsh Review, published by Gwyn Jones, first in 1939 and then between 1944 and 1948. (See also Life and Letters Today, which between 1938–50 contained works by and about many Welsh writers in English.)
The attitude of the post-war generation of Welsh writers in English towards Wales differs from the previous generation, in that they were more sympathetic to Welsh nationalism and to the Welsh language. The change can be linked to the nationalist fervour generated by Saunders Lewis and the burning of the Bombing School on the Lleyn Peninsula in 1936, along with a sense of crisis generated by World War II. In poetry R. S. Thomas
(1913–2000) was the most important figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with The Stones of the Field in 1946 and concluding with No Truce with the Furies (1995). While he "did not learn the Welsh language until he was 30 and wrote all his poems in English", he wanted the Welsh language to be made the first language of Wales, and the official policy of bilingualism abolished. He wrote his autobiography in Welsh, but said he lacked the necessary grasp of the language to employ it in his poems. Although an Anglican priest, he was a fervent nationalist and advocated non-violent action against English owners of holiday homes in Wales. As an admirer of Saunders Lewis, Thomas defended his need to use English: "Since there is in Wales a mother tongue that continues to flourish, a proper Welshman can only look on English as a means of rekindling interest in the Welsh language, and of leading people back to the mother tongue."
In the field of fiction the major figure in the second half of the twentieth century was Emyr Humphreys
(1919). Humphreys' first novel The Little Kingdom was published in 1946; and during his long writing career he has published over twenty novels. These include A Toy Epic (1958), Outside the House of Baal (1965), and a sequence of seven novels, The Land of the Living, which surveys the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales. With regard to the fact that he wrote in English, Humphreys refers to "using the language of cultural supremacy to try to express something that comes directly from the suppressed native culture" of Wales. His most recent work is the collection of short stories, The Woman in the Window (2009).
Another novelist of the post-Second-World-War era was Raymond Williams
(1921–88). Born near Abergavenny, Williams continued the earlier tradition of writing from a left-wing perspective on the Welsh industrial scene in his trilogy "Border Country
" (1960), "Second Generation" (1964), and "The Fight for Manod" (1979). He also enjoyed a reputation as a cultural historian. He was an influential figure within the New Left
and in wider circles. His writings on politics, the mass media, and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
in 1964, and the establishment of a Welsh Office
in Cardiff the following year. With these developments came an Arts Council for Wales. For the Welsh-speaking minority there was the Welsh Language Act
of 1967, and – from the 1970s – the establishment of more schools using Welsh as their primary means of instruction (see education in Wales
). A Welsh-language TV channel was set up in 1982. The culmination of this trend was the creation of a National Assembly for Wales
in 1999. The defeat of the first Welsh devolution referendum in 1979 had been a grave disappointment to Welsh nationalists.
The expansion in the publication of Anglo-Welsh writers in Wales in journal and book form was important for the further development of Welsh writing in English. This included The Welsh Review (1939–1948), which later became Dock Leaves and then The Anglo-Welsh Review (1949–1987) and continues (from 1988) as the New Welsh Review. In 1967 another important Anglo-Welsh journal, Poetry Wales, was founded by Meic Stephens
, assisted by Harri Webb. Shortly thereafter, in 1970, Planet was launched by Ned Thomas. In the early 1990s came the yearly Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays edited by M. Wynn Thomas & Tony Brown.
Amongst book publishers, the University of Wales Press, founded in 1922, has been influential. Poetry Wales became involved with publishing, firstly as Poetry Wales Press, and then, since 1985, as Seren Books. Y Lolfa, founded in the 1960s as a Welsh-language publishing house, later began producing English-language books on subjects of Welsh interest. Gomer Press, based in Llandysul, Carmarthenshire, is another supporter of Welsh writing in English. It was established in 1892 and claims to be '"the largest publishing house in Wales". A more recent addition to Welsh publishing in English is Honno Press, which specialises in women writers.
To return to literature itself, the problems of post-industrial South Wales of the 1960's and 1970's is the subject for novelists such as Alun Richards
(1929–2004) and Ron Berry
(1920–97). Both use humour in their bitter description of the spiritual decay of the South Wales valleys
, where the heavy industries of iron and steel and coal have disappeared, to be replaced by high-technology industrial parks. Similar themes are angrily expressed in the novels of a younger generation, as in Christopher Meredith
's (born 1954) Shifts (1988), which deals with the closing of a steel mill, and Duncan Bush's (born 1946) grim portrait of urban isolation Glass Shot (1991).
The subject matter of the Cardiff-born Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens
(1928–2004) is quite different. She was a member of Cardiff's small Jewish community; and associated themes were a central concern of much of her writing, including Brothers (1983), where parallels with her own ancestry are obvious: it follows four generations of a family which flees Russia for South Wales. As only a couple of her 25 novels have a Welsh setting she does not fit the narrower definitions of Welsh writing in English.
While the Anglo-Welsh literary scene tended to be dominated by fiction in the 1930s, in the latter part of the twentieth century poetry flourished. A landmark event was the 1967 publication of Bryn Griffith's anthology Welsh Voices, which, in Tony Conran's words, was "the most lively and exciting selection of contemporary Anglo-Welsh poetry ever to have appeared".
Tony Conran
(born 1931) is an important figure in this so-called second flowering as critic, poet, and translator of Welsh poetry. His Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967) has been especially helpful in bridging the gap between the Welsh and English speaking. In his own poetry he makes use of Welsh tradition: for example, his elegy for Welsh soldiers killed in the Falklands War is modelled on Aneirin's Y Gododdin
. Swansea poet Harri Webb
's (1920–1994) verse, including The Green Desert (1969), is marked in its themes by a radical and uncompromising commitment to Welsh nationalist politics. Another important poet of the late twentieth century is Tony Curtis
(born 1946) from Carmarthen: he is the author of several collections, most recently War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), and Heaven's Gate (2001). John Tripp (1927–86), a convinced Welsh nationalist, was ironically aware of the fact that, while born in Wales, he had worked outside the Principality until his early forties.
Robert Minhinnick
, born in 1952, is a notable writer from the second half of the twentieth century. He has been the winner of a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award, and has twice won the Forward Prize for best individual poem, while his collections of essays have twice won the Wales Book of the Year Award. Minhinnick edited Poetry Wales magazine from 1997 to 2008. His first novel, Sea Holly (2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.
Welsh writing in English tended from the beginning to be dominated by men, but the period after World War II produced some distinguished Welsh women poets, including Ruth Bidgood
(born 1922), Gillian Clarke
(born 1937), and Sheenagh Pugh
(born 1950). Pugh was born in Birmingham, but lived for many years in Cardiff and taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in 2008. Her collection Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2000. She has twice won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. She has also published novels. She now lives in Shetland.
Although Ruth Bidgood was born near Neath in 1922, her first collection The Given Time appeared only in 1972. Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator from Welsh. She was born in Cardiff and raised there, in Penarth, and in Pembrokeshire. Both her parents were native Welsh speakers, yet she was brought up speaking English and learnt Welsh only as an adult. In the mid-1980s she moved to rural Ceredigion, West Wales. She became the third National Poet for Wales in 2008.
Amongst other poets of the second half of the twentieth century, the names of Roland Mathias
(1915–2007), Leslie Norris
(1921–2006), John Ormond
(1923–1990), Dannie Abse
(born 1923), Raymond Garlick
(born 1926), Peter Finch
(born 1947), and perhaps also Paul Groves
(born 1947) have a significant place. With regard to the current situation of Welsh poetry in English, Ian Gregson suggests that "much of the most exciting poetry in Britain is being written in Wales". He singles out Oliver Reynolds
(born 1957), Gwyneth Lewis
(born 1959), and Stephen Knight
(born 1960) as having fulfilled "their early promise".
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
by Welsh writers. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language literature.
Introduction
The phrase 'Welsh writing in English' has replaced the earlier 'Anglo-Welsh literature' because many Welsh writers in English have felt that the latter usage failed to give "Welsh status to Welsh people who, not speaking Cymraeg, nevertheless do not feel at all English".There is no final, clear definition of what constitutes a Welsh writer in English, or Anglo-Welsh author. Obviously it includes Welshmen whose first language is English, rather than Welsh, such as Swansea born Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
(1914–53) and novelist Emyr Humphreys
Emyr Humphreys
Emyr Humphreys is a leading Welsh novelist, poet and author. He was born at Prestatyn in Flintshire, and attended University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He registered as a conscientious objector at the outbreak of the Second World War...
, born in Prestatyn in 1919. But it also includes those born outside Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
with Welsh parentage, who were influenced by their Welsh roots, like London-born poet David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...
(1895–1974). Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues defines the Anglo-Welsh as "those Welsh men and women who write in English about Wales" (p.37).
In addition, writers born outside Wales, who have both lived in as well as written about Wales, are often included, such as John Cowper Powys
John Cowper Powys
-Biography:Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys , who was vicar of Montacute, Somerset for thirty-two years, and Mary Cowper Johnson, a descendent of the poet William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also...
(1872–1963), who settled in Wales in 1935 and wrote two major novels, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius (1949), that have Welsh subject matter. In addition to using Welsh history and settings, Powys also uses the mythology of The Mabinogion
Mabinogion
The Mabinogion is the title given to a collection of eleven prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts. The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions...
. He also studied the Welsh language. Then there is the poet, teacher, and critic Jeremy Hooker
Jeremy Hooker
Jeremy Hooker is an English poet, critic, teacher, and broadcaster. He grew up on the edge of the New Forest village of Pennington, about two miles north of Lymington. After studying at the University of Southampton, Hooker lectured at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth...
(born 1941), who taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1965–84 and became deeply involved in writing about and teaching Welsh writing in English during this time, though he wrote only a few poems with Welsh subject matter. The Liverpool-born novelist James Hanley (1897–1985) lived in Wales from 1931 until 1963 and was buried there, but only a few of his many works have Welsh subject matters. As one writer notes: "a widely debatable area of Anglo-Welsh acceptability exists". Saunders Lewis
Saunders Lewis
Saunders Lewis was a Welsh poet, dramatist, historian, literary critic, and political activist. He was a prominent Welsh nationalist and a founder of the Welsh National Party...
, the noted Welsh-language poet, novelist, dramatist, and nationalist, in fact rejected the possibility of Anglo-Welsh literature, because of the use of the language of the British colonialists, affirming that '"the literature which people called Anglo-Welsh was indistinguishable from English literature".
The beginnings
While Raymond GarlickRaymond Garlick
Raymond Garlick was an Anglo-Welsh poet and editor. Garlick was born in London, but grew up in Llandudno, and studied English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor. Whilst there, he converted to Roman Catholicism, although no longer a practising Catholic...
discovered sixty-nine Welsh men and women who wrote in English prior to the twentieth century, Dafydd Johnston thinks it "debatable whether such writers belong to a recognisable Anglo-Welsh literature, as opposed to English literature in general".
While historically Welsh writing in English might be said to begin with the fifteenth-century bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal
Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal
Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal was a Welsh poet, from Norman stock. He composed primarily in Welsh, but was also responsible for the first known poem in the English language written by a Welshman....
, well into the nineteenth century English was spoken by few in Wales, and prior to the early twentieth century there are only three major Welsh-born writers who wrote in the English language: George Herbert
George Herbert
George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in...
(1593–1633) from Montgomeryshire, Henry Vaughan
Henry Vaughan
Henry Vaughan was a Welsh physician and metaphysical poet.Vaughan and his twin brother the hermetic philosopher and alchemist Thomas Vaughan, were the sons of Thomas Vaughan and his wife Denise of 'Trenewydd', Newton, in Brecknockshire, Wales...
from Brecknockshire (1622–1695), and John Dyer
John Dyer
John Dyer was a painter and Welsh poet turned clergyman of the Church of England who maintained an interest in his Welsh ancestry...
from Carmarthenshire (1699–1757). While some see them as clearly belonging to the English tradition, Belinda Humphrey believes that both Vaughan and Dyer are Anglo-Welsh poets because, unlike Herbert, they are "rooted creatively in the Welsh countryside of their birth". Furthermore she suggests in Vaughan's case the possible influence of the tradition of Welsh-language poetry.
The beginnings of an Anglo-Welsh tradition are found by some in the novels of Allen Raine
Allen Raine
Allen Raine was the pseudonym of the Welsh novelist Anne Adalisa Beynon Puddicombe .She was born Anne Adalisa Evans in Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, the daughter of a lawyer Benjamin and Letitia Grace Evans...
(Anne Adalisa (Evans) Puddicombe) (1836–1908), from Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, whose work, Stephen Knight proposes, "realised a real, if partial, separate identity and value for a Welsh social culture". (Other possible precursors are Monmouthshire-born Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror...
(1863–1947), and Joseph Keating (1871–1934), who began his working life as a South Wales miner.) However, many see the Carmarthenshire-born satirical short-story writer and novelist Caradoc Evans
Caradoc Evans
David Caradoc Evans , was a Welsh story writer, novelist and playwright. Caradoc met and later married the Countess Helene Marguerite Barcynska, who wrote romantic novels under the name Oliver Sandys...
(1878–1945) as the first—or first modern—Welsh writer in English. His short-story collections My People (1915) and Capel Sion (1916) were highly controversial, and Roland Mathias bitterly comments that "No other Anglo-Welsh prose writer. .. displayed such ill will to Wales or to Welsh people". W. H. Davies
W. H. Davies
William Henry Davies or W. H. Davies was a Welsh poet and writer. Davies spent a significant part of his life as a tramp or vagabond in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time...
(1871–1940), born in Newport
Newport
Newport is a city and unitary authority area in Wales. Standing on the banks of the River Usk, it is located about east of Cardiff and is the largest urban area within the historic county boundaries of Monmouthshire and the preserved county of Gwent...
, became famous principally for his The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is an autobiography published in 1908 by the Welsh poet and writer William Henry Davies...
which was set mostly in North America. Although his poetry was typically inspired by Nature in general, some of his works, such as his 1918 "A Poet's Pilgrimage (or A Pilgrimage In Wales)" were set in his homeland. (See also Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844–89), Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas (poet)
Philip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh writer of prose and poetry. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Already an accomplished writer, Thomas turned to poetry only in 1914...
(1878–1917) and Joseph Keating (1871–1934).)
To a large extent, though not entirely, "The first flowering of Welsh writing in English" was in industrial South Wales and this was linked to the rapid decline in the use of the Welsh language in the twentieth century, especially in this region. David Jones and Dylan Thomas are two writers of the 1930s who do not fit into this paradigm.
1930s: The First Wave
During the nineteenth century the use of the Welsh language declined generally in Wales, with the development of compulsory education in the English language, but more so in the south because of immigration from England and Ireland as a result of industrialisation. This loss of language was an important factor in the development of Anglo-Welsh writing in South Wales, especially in the mining valleys. While some of these authors came from Welsh-speaking families, they generally tended to associate this language with the repressive religion of Nonconformist chapels.An early work of the first wave of Anglo-Welsh writers was The Withered Root (1927) by Rhys Davies
Rhys Davies
Rhys Davies was a Welsh novelist and short story writer, who wrote in the English language....
(1901–78) from the Rhondda Valley. While he probably wrote more fiction about the industrial world of the South Wales Valleys
South Wales Valleys
The South Wales Valleys are a number of industrialised valleys in South Wales, stretching from eastern Carmarthenshire in the west to western Monmouthshire in the east and from the Heads of the Valleys in the north to the lower-lying, pastoral country of the Vale of Glamorgan and the coastal plain...
than anyone else, Rhys Davies was in fact a grocer's son who was living in London by the time he was twenty. Unlike that of other writers from the mining community, his fiction is more concerned with individuals, in particular women, than with politics. D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
was a major influence on Rhys, though similarities with Caradoc Evans have been noted, and it has been suggested that he had "The tendency to process images of the Welsh valleys for consumption by English audiences". Another Anglo-Welsh novelist (and playwright) was Jack Jones
Jack Jones (novelist)
Jack Jones was a Welsh novelist and playwright who began writing in the 1930s.-Early years:Jack Jones was born in 1884 at Tai-Harri-Blawdd in Merthyr Tydfil, the son of a coal miner. He joined his father to work in the mine aged 12. At the age of 17 he joined the army and was posted to South...
(1884–1970), a miner's son from Merthyr Tydfil who was himself a miner from the age of 12. He was active in the union movement and politics, starting with the communist party, but in the course of his life he was involved, to some degree, with all the major British parties. Amongst his novels of working-class life are Rhondda Roundabout
Rhondda Roundabout
Rhondda Roundabout was the first published novel by Welsh writer Jack Jones.The story is set in the Rhondda Valley in the early 1930s. It chronicles the trials and tribulations of the peoples, set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the 1926 United Kingdom General Strike and the Great...
(1935) and Bidden to the Feast (1938). The political development of a young miner is the subject of Cwmardy (1937), Lewis Jones
Lewis Jones (writer)
Lewis Jones, writer, and political activist of the left, was born in Clydach Vale in industrialized South Wales.Although his novels are more studied by academics now than by general readers, Jones occupies an honourable place in the history of left-wing politics in Britain, and in the ranks of...
's (1897–1939) largely autobiographical novel. Gwyn Thomas
Gwyn Thomas (novelist)
Gwyn Thomas was a Welsh writer who has been called 'the true voice of the English-speaking valleys'.-Early life:...
(1913–81) was also a coalminer's son from the Rhondda, but won a scholarship to Oxford and then became a schoolmaster. He wrote 11 novels as well as short stories, plays, and radio and television scripts, most of which focused on unemployment in the Rhondda Valley in the 1930s. He has been described by Stephen Knight as "about the most verbally brilliant writer of Welsh fiction in English". His inaugural novel Sorrow for Thy Sons (1937) was rejected by Gollancz and not published until 1986. Thomas's first accepted book was a collection of short stories, Where Did I Put My Pity: Folk-Tales From the Modern Welsh, which appeared in 1946. He was also known for his negative attitude to the Welsh language, and Glyn Jones sees him as falling "short of being a completely representative figure ... in his attitude to Wales and Welshness," as Gwyn Thomas "appears in his writing to have little sympathy with the national aspirations and indigenous culture of our country". Another writer who escaped from his proletarian background was Gwyn Jones
Gwyn Jones (author)
Gwyn Jones was a Welsh novelist and story writer, and a scholar and translator of Nordic literature and history.Jones was a native of New Tredegar, Monmouthshire...
(1907–1999). He wrote about this world in novels and short stories, including Times Like These (1936) which explores the life of a working-class family during the 1926 miners' strike. Jones founded The Welsh Review in 1939, which he edited until 1948; this journal was important for raising discussion of Welsh issues. What is probably the most famous novel about Wales, Richard Llewellyn
Richard Llewellyn
Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd , better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, was a Welsh novelist.Llewellyn Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd (8 December 1906 – 30 November 1983), better known by his pen name Richard Llewellyn, was a Welsh novelist.Llewellyn Richard Dafydd...
's How Green Was My Valley
How Green Was My Valley
How Green Was My Valley is a 1939 novel by Richard Llewellyn, telling the story through narration of the main character, of his Welsh family and the mining community in which they live. The author had claimed to have based the book on his own knowledge of the Gilfach Goch area, but this was proven...
, was published in 1939. It is described by Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues as a "staggering and accomplished piece of literary hokum" (p.51), "a book [that Jones finds] impossible to take seriously, though much of it [he] read with absorption" (p.53). (See also Margiad Evans
Margiad Evans
Margiad Evans was the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler , a poet, novelist and illustrator with a lifelong identification with the Welsh border country.-Life and works:...
[Peggy Whistler] (1909–58); Richard Hughes
Richard Hughes (writer)
Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.He was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was a civil servant Arthur Hughes, and his mother Louisa Grace Warren who had been brought up in Jamaica...
(1900–76); Alexander Cordell
Alexander Cordell
Alexander Cordell was the pen-name of George Alexander Graber, a prolific Welsh novelist and author of thirty acclaimed works including Rape of the Fair Country, The Hosts of Rebecca and Song of the Earth....
(1914–97).)
The mining valleys produced a significant working-class poet in Idris Davies
Idris Davies
Idris Davies was a Welsh poet. He was born in Rhymney, near Caerphilly in South Wales, the Welsh-speaking son of colliery chief winderman Evan Davies and his wife Elizabeth Ann. Davies became a poet, originally writing in Welsh, but later writing exclusively in English...
(1905–53), who worked as a coal miner before qualifying as a teacher. He initially wrote in Welsh "but rebellion against chapel religion", along with the "inspirational influence of English" poets, led him to write in English. Gwalia Deserta (1938) is about the Great Depression, while the subject of The Angry Summer (1943) is the 1926 miners' strike.
There are a number of other authors who published before the Second World War but who did not come from the South Wales valleys.
Amongst these was Swansea suburbanite Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
(1914–53), whose first collection, 18 Poems, was published in 1934. Then there is Geraint Goodwin
Geraint Goodwin
Geraint Goodwin was a Welsh novelist and short story writer. He was born in the village of Llanllwchaearn, on the outskirts of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the son of Richard Goodwin and Mary Jane Goodwin...
(1903–41) from Newtown in mid-Wales, who, in such works as the novel The Heyday in the Blood (1936), wrote about declining rural communities in the border region. David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...
(1895–1974), whose father was from North Wales, was born in a London suburb. His epic poem In Parenthesis, which deals with his World War I experiences, was published in 1937. Another Swansea poet Vernon Watkins
Vernon Watkins
Vernon Phillips Watkins , was a British poet, and a translator and painter. He was a close friend of Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English"....
(1906–67) likewise does not belong with the main group of writers of the so-called First Wave from the South Wales mining communities. Roland Mathias suggests that "his use of Welsh tradition was highly selective – only the ancient custom of the Mari Lwyd and the legend of Taliesin". Alun Lewis
Alun Lewis
Alun Lewis , was a poet of the Anglo-Welsh school, and is regarded by many as Britain's finest Second World War poet.- Education :...
(1915–44), from Cwmaman near Aberdare, published both poetry and short fiction and might well have been a major figure in the decades after the war but for his early death.
The Anglo-Welsh writers of the 1930s had to look to London for publication and the possibility of literary success; though gradually, beginning in 1937, Welsh writing in English received encouragement from Welsh-based literary and critical journals, initially Wales, published by Keidrych Rhys in three intermittent series between 1937 and 1960. Next came the Welsh Review, published by Gwyn Jones, first in 1939 and then between 1944 and 1948. (See also Life and Letters Today, which between 1938–50 contained works by and about many Welsh writers in English.)
After 1945
The careers of some 1930s writers continued after World War Two, including those of Gwyn Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and Dylan Thomas, whose most famous work Under Milk Wood was first broadcast in 1954. The critic, novelist, and poet Glyn Jones's (1905–1995) career also began in the 1930s, but he belongs more to the later era, and one of his most important works, the novel The Island of Apples, was published in 1965. His first language had been Welsh but he chose to write in English. James A. Davies describes him as "a considerable talent in need of the great editor he never managed to find". David Jones also first published in the late 1930s, yet he too belongs more to the post-war era. Tony Conran in 2003 suggested that it was not until the late sixties, "with the 'fragments' that were to be collected in The Sleeping Lord (1974), that his work began to enter our bloodstream and be seen as a significant part of the Anglo-Welsh renaissance".The attitude of the post-war generation of Welsh writers in English towards Wales differs from the previous generation, in that they were more sympathetic to Welsh nationalism and to the Welsh language. The change can be linked to the nationalist fervour generated by Saunders Lewis and the burning of the Bombing School on the Lleyn Peninsula in 1936, along with a sense of crisis generated by World War II. In poetry R. S. Thomas
R. S. Thomas
Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh poet and Anglican clergyman, noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales...
(1913–2000) was the most important figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with The Stones of the Field in 1946 and concluding with No Truce with the Furies (1995). While he "did not learn the Welsh language until he was 30 and wrote all his poems in English", he wanted the Welsh language to be made the first language of Wales, and the official policy of bilingualism abolished. He wrote his autobiography in Welsh, but said he lacked the necessary grasp of the language to employ it in his poems. Although an Anglican priest, he was a fervent nationalist and advocated non-violent action against English owners of holiday homes in Wales. As an admirer of Saunders Lewis, Thomas defended his need to use English: "Since there is in Wales a mother tongue that continues to flourish, a proper Welshman can only look on English as a means of rekindling interest in the Welsh language, and of leading people back to the mother tongue."
In the field of fiction the major figure in the second half of the twentieth century was Emyr Humphreys
Emyr Humphreys
Emyr Humphreys is a leading Welsh novelist, poet and author. He was born at Prestatyn in Flintshire, and attended University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He registered as a conscientious objector at the outbreak of the Second World War...
(1919). Humphreys' first novel The Little Kingdom was published in 1946; and during his long writing career he has published over twenty novels. These include A Toy Epic (1958), Outside the House of Baal (1965), and a sequence of seven novels, The Land of the Living, which surveys the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales. With regard to the fact that he wrote in English, Humphreys refers to "using the language of cultural supremacy to try to express something that comes directly from the suppressed native culture" of Wales. His most recent work is the collection of short stories, The Woman in the Window (2009).
Another novelist of the post-Second-World-War era was Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
(1921–88). Born near Abergavenny, Williams continued the earlier tradition of writing from a left-wing perspective on the Welsh industrial scene in his trilogy "Border Country
Border Country
Border Country is a novel by Raymond Williams. The book was re-published in December 2005 as one of the first group of titles in the Library of Wales series, having been out of print for several years. Written in English, the novel was first published in 1960.It is set in rural South Wales, close...
" (1960), "Second Generation" (1964), and "The Fight for Manod" (1979). He also enjoyed a reputation as a cultural historian. He was an influential figure within the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
and in wider circles. His writings on politics, the mass media, and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
1960s and after
While the second half of the twentieth century saw the serious decline of Welsh heavy industry, along with serious unemployment and the hardship and suffering that came with it, it also saw significant cultural gains with regard to a separate Welsh identity within the British Isles, starting with the appointing of a Secretary of State for WalesSecretary of State for Wales
The Secretary of State for Wales is the head of the Wales Office within the British cabinet. He or she is responsible for ensuring Welsh interests are taken into account by the government, representing the government within Wales and overseeing the passing of legislation which is only for Wales...
in 1964, and the establishment of a Welsh Office
Welsh Office
The Welsh Office was a department in the Government of the United Kingdom with responsibilities for Wales. It was established in April 1965 to execute government policy in Wales, and was headed by the Secretary of State for Wales, a post which had been created in October 1964...
in Cardiff the following year. With these developments came an Arts Council for Wales. For the Welsh-speaking minority there was the Welsh Language Act
Welsh Language Act 1967
The Welsh Language Act 1967 , is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which gave some rights to use the Welsh language in legal proceedings in Wales and gave the relevant Minister the right to authorise the production of a Welsh version of any documents required or allowed by the Act...
of 1967, and – from the 1970s – the establishment of more schools using Welsh as their primary means of instruction (see education in Wales
Education in Wales
Education in Wales differs in certain respects from education elsewhere in the United Kingdom. For example, a significant number of students all over Wales are educated either wholly or largely through the medium of Welsh: in 2008/09, 22 per cent of classes in maintained primary schools used Welsh...
). A Welsh-language TV channel was set up in 1982. The culmination of this trend was the creation of a National Assembly for Wales
National Assembly for Wales
The National Assembly for Wales is a devolved assembly with power to make legislation in Wales. The Assembly comprises 60 members, who are known as Assembly Members, or AMs...
in 1999. The defeat of the first Welsh devolution referendum in 1979 had been a grave disappointment to Welsh nationalists.
The expansion in the publication of Anglo-Welsh writers in Wales in journal and book form was important for the further development of Welsh writing in English. This included The Welsh Review (1939–1948), which later became Dock Leaves and then The Anglo-Welsh Review (1949–1987) and continues (from 1988) as the New Welsh Review. In 1967 another important Anglo-Welsh journal, Poetry Wales, was founded by Meic Stephens
Meic Stephens
Meic Stephens is a Welsh author and literary journalist. Stephens studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and at the University of Rennes in France. From 1967 until 1990 Stephens was Literature Director of the Welsh Arts Council...
, assisted by Harri Webb. Shortly thereafter, in 1970, Planet was launched by Ned Thomas. In the early 1990s came the yearly Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays edited by M. Wynn Thomas & Tony Brown.
Amongst book publishers, the University of Wales Press, founded in 1922, has been influential. Poetry Wales became involved with publishing, firstly as Poetry Wales Press, and then, since 1985, as Seren Books. Y Lolfa, founded in the 1960s as a Welsh-language publishing house, later began producing English-language books on subjects of Welsh interest. Gomer Press, based in Llandysul, Carmarthenshire, is another supporter of Welsh writing in English. It was established in 1892 and claims to be '"the largest publishing house in Wales". A more recent addition to Welsh publishing in English is Honno Press, which specialises in women writers.
To return to literature itself, the problems of post-industrial South Wales of the 1960's and 1970's is the subject for novelists such as Alun Richards
Alun Richards
Alun Morgun Richards was a Welsh novelist, best known for his novel Ennal's Point, about the work of a lifeboat crew in South Wales.Richards was born in King Edward Avenue, Caerphilly...
(1929–2004) and Ron Berry
Ron Berry
Ronald Anthony "Ron" Berry was a Welsh author of novels and short stories. Born in the Rhondda Valleys where he remained for most his life, his books reflect the working class of the industrial valleys though his vision is more optimistic and there is less concern for politics and religion which...
(1920–97). Both use humour in their bitter description of the spiritual decay of the South Wales valleys
South Wales Valleys
The South Wales Valleys are a number of industrialised valleys in South Wales, stretching from eastern Carmarthenshire in the west to western Monmouthshire in the east and from the Heads of the Valleys in the north to the lower-lying, pastoral country of the Vale of Glamorgan and the coastal plain...
, where the heavy industries of iron and steel and coal have disappeared, to be replaced by high-technology industrial parks. Similar themes are angrily expressed in the novels of a younger generation, as in Christopher Meredith
Christopher Meredith
- Personal life :He was educated at Tredegar Comprehensive school and later studied philosophy and English at Aberystwyth University. He has a wife and two sons, Rhodri and Steffan...
's (born 1954) Shifts (1988), which deals with the closing of a steel mill, and Duncan Bush's (born 1946) grim portrait of urban isolation Glass Shot (1991).
The subject matter of the Cardiff-born Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens
Bernice Rubens
Bernice Rubens was a Booker Prize-winning Welsh novelist.-Background:She was of Russian Jewish descent and born in Cardiff, Wales where she attended Cardiff High School. She came from a very musical family, both her brothers becoming well-known classical musicians. She was married to Rudi...
(1928–2004) is quite different. She was a member of Cardiff's small Jewish community; and associated themes were a central concern of much of her writing, including Brothers (1983), where parallels with her own ancestry are obvious: it follows four generations of a family which flees Russia for South Wales. As only a couple of her 25 novels have a Welsh setting she does not fit the narrower definitions of Welsh writing in English.
While the Anglo-Welsh literary scene tended to be dominated by fiction in the 1930s, in the latter part of the twentieth century poetry flourished. A landmark event was the 1967 publication of Bryn Griffith's anthology Welsh Voices, which, in Tony Conran's words, was "the most lively and exciting selection of contemporary Anglo-Welsh poetry ever to have appeared".
Tony Conran
Tony Conran
Tony Conran is a Welsh poet and translator of Welsh poetry. His own poetry is written in English but is very much influenced by Welsh language literature and Welsh culture and history. To some extent there are parallels in Conran's writing with that of R. S...
(born 1931) is an important figure in this so-called second flowering as critic, poet, and translator of Welsh poetry. His Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967) has been especially helpful in bridging the gap between the Welsh and English speaking. In his own poetry he makes use of Welsh tradition: for example, his elegy for Welsh soldiers killed in the Falklands War is modelled on Aneirin's Y Gododdin
Gododdin
The Gododdin were a Brittonic people of north-eastern Britain in the sub-Roman period, the area known as the Hen Ogledd or Old North...
. Swansea poet Harri Webb
Harri Webb
Harri Webb was an Anglo-Welsh poet, journalist and Welsh nationalist.Harri Webb was born on 7 September 1920 at 45 Ty Coch Road on the outskirts of Swansea, but before he was two the family moved to Catherine Street, much nearer the city centre...
's (1920–1994) verse, including The Green Desert (1969), is marked in its themes by a radical and uncompromising commitment to Welsh nationalist politics. Another important poet of the late twentieth century is Tony Curtis
Tony Curtis (Welsh poet)
Tony Curtis FRSL is an Anglo-Welsh poet.Curtis was born in Carmarthen and educated at the University of Wales, Swansea. He subsequently studied for the MFA degree at Goddard College, Vermont, becoming the only British writer ever to graduate from that course.His debut in print was Three Young...
(born 1946) from Carmarthen: he is the author of several collections, most recently War Voices (1995), The Arches (1998), and Heaven's Gate (2001). John Tripp (1927–86), a convinced Welsh nationalist, was ironically aware of the fact that, while born in Wales, he had worked outside the Principality until his early forties.
Robert Minhinnick
Robert Minhinnick
Robert Minhinnick is a Welsh poet, essayist, novelist and translator.Minhinnick was born in Neath, and now lives in Porthcawl. He studied at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and University of Wales, Cardiff. An environmental campaigner, he co-founded the charities Friends of the Earth and...
, born in 1952, is a notable writer from the second half of the twentieth century. He has been the winner of a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award, and has twice won the Forward Prize for best individual poem, while his collections of essays have twice won the Wales Book of the Year Award. Minhinnick edited Poetry Wales magazine from 1997 to 2008. His first novel, Sea Holly (2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.
Welsh writing in English tended from the beginning to be dominated by men, but the period after World War II produced some distinguished Welsh women poets, including Ruth Bidgood
Ruth Bidgood
Ruth Bidgood is a British poet.She was born at Blaendulais, Seven Sisters near Neath. Her Welsh-speaking father was a priest in Port Talbot, where Ruth was brought up...
(born 1922), Gillian Clarke
Gillian Clarke
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator from Welsh.-Life:Clarke was born in Cardiff and brought up in Cardiff and Penarth, though for part of the Second World War she was in Pembrokeshire...
(born 1937), and Sheenagh Pugh
Sheenagh Pugh
Sheenagh Pugh is a British poet, novelist and translator who writes in the English language.-Life:Sheenagh Pugh studied languages at the University of Bristol. She now lives in Shetland but lived for many years in Cardiff and taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in...
(born 1950). Pugh was born in Birmingham, but lived for many years in Cardiff and taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in 2008. Her collection Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2000. She has twice won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. She has also published novels. She now lives in Shetland.
Although Ruth Bidgood was born near Neath in 1922, her first collection The Given Time appeared only in 1972. Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator from Welsh. She was born in Cardiff and raised there, in Penarth, and in Pembrokeshire. Both her parents were native Welsh speakers, yet she was brought up speaking English and learnt Welsh only as an adult. In the mid-1980s she moved to rural Ceredigion, West Wales. She became the third National Poet for Wales in 2008.
Amongst other poets of the second half of the twentieth century, the names of Roland Mathias
Roland Mathias
Roland Glyn Mathias , was a Welsh writer, known for his poetry and short stories. He was also a literary critic, and responsible with Raymond Garlick for the success of the literary magazine Dock Leaves , later from 1957 The Anglo-Welsh Review. He edited it from 1961 to 1976...
(1915–2007), Leslie Norris
Leslie Norris
George Leslie Norris FRSL , was a prize-winning Welsh poet and short story writer. Up to 1974 he earned his living as a college lecturer, teacher and headmaster...
(1921–2006), John Ormond
John Ormond
John Ormond , was a Welsh poet and filmmaker.Ormond was born in Dunvant, near Swansea, and was educated at Swansea University.He joined the staff of Picture Post in 1945. He returned to Swansea in 1949 and, in 1957, began what was to be a distinguished career with BBC Wales as a director and...
(1923–1990), Dannie Abse
Dannie Abse
Daniel Abse, better known as Dannie Abse , is a Welsh poet.-Early years:Abse was born in Cardiff, Wales to a Jewish family. He is the younger brother of politician and reformer Leo Abse and the eminent psychoanalyst, Wilfred Abse...
(born 1923), Raymond Garlick
Raymond Garlick
Raymond Garlick was an Anglo-Welsh poet and editor. Garlick was born in London, but grew up in Llandudno, and studied English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor. Whilst there, he converted to Roman Catholicism, although no longer a practising Catholic...
(born 1926), Peter Finch
Peter Finch (poet)
Peter Finch is a Welsh poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff, Wales. He is Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms...
(born 1947), and perhaps also Paul Groves
Paul Groves
Paul Groves is an English former footballer who notably captained and managed Grimsby Town. He was naturally a central midfield player, but later in his career was used as a central defender...
(born 1947) have a significant place. With regard to the current situation of Welsh poetry in English, Ian Gregson suggests that "much of the most exciting poetry in Britain is being written in Wales". He singles out Oliver Reynolds
Oliver Reynolds
Oliver Reynolds is a British poet and critic. He studied drama at the University of Hull before returning to Wales to work as an assistant to the Director for Theatre Wales. He won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1985 for his poem 'Rorschach Writing' and the Eric Gregory...
(born 1957), Gwyneth Lewis
Gwyneth Lewis
Gwyneth Lewis is a Welsh poet, and was the first National Poet for Wales.-Biography:Born into a Welsh speaking family, Lewis's father started teaching her English when her mother went into hospital to give birth to her sister....
(born 1959), and Stephen Knight
Stephen Knight (poet)
Stephen Knight is a Welsh poet and writer. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1987 and won the National Poetry Competition in 1992. He won the 2003 TLS/ Blackwells Poetry Competition for ‘The Long Way Home’. His writing deals with disappointment and decay, albeit with a lightness of...
(born 1960) as having fulfilled "their early promise".