Welsh literature in English
While some see them as clearly belonging to the English tradition,[18] 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".
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale had previously been attributed to Chaucer but the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature notes the absence of direct evidence of that when linking Clanvowe with the work.
[21] 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 Thomas Knight proposes, "realised a real, if partial, separate identity and value for a Welsh social culture".
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.
The principal themes in his work are observations about life's hardships, the ways in which the human condition is reflected in nature, his own tramping adventures and the various characters he met.
It was not until 1902 when David Lloyd George called for patronage of Welsh drama at the National Eisteddfod that a profile of respectability started to be acquired among devout communities.
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.
[26] 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".
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.
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.
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".
[30] 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 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.
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".
[33] 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).
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.
[38] At a local level Fred Hando (1888–1970) chronicled and illustrated the history, character and folklore of Monmouthshire (which he also called Gwent), in a series of over 800 articles and several books published between the 1920s and 1960s.
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.
In the early 1990s came the yearly Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays edited by M. Wynn Thomas & Tony Brown.
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).
[41] 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.
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".
[43] 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.
His eight-novel Angel Mountain Saga, set in north Pembrokeshire in the Regency and early Victorian period, is effectively a portrayal of "Mother Wales" in the persona of the heroine Martha Morgan.
[46] John Evans is one of Wales' most uncompromising writers,[47] a former punk rocker, poet, filmmaker[48] and novelist he has also campaigned against the Badger cull alongside Brian May and other celebrities.
[49] Poets included were: Tiffany Atkinson, Zoe Brigley, Sarah Corbett, Damian Walford Davies, Nia Davies, Jasmine Donahaye, Joe Dunthorne, Jonathan Edwards, Rhian Edwards, Kristian Evans, Matthew Francis, Dai George, Ian Gregson, Philip Gross, Emily Hinshelwood, Meirion Jordan, Anna Lewis, Gwyneth Lewis, Patrick McGuiness, Andrew McNeillie, Kate North, Pascale Petit, clare e. potter, Deryn Rees-Jones, Fiona Sampson, Zoe Skoulding, Katherine Stansfield, Richard Marggraff Turley, Anna Wigley, and Samantha Wynn-Rhydderch.
[59] Nerys Williams is originally from Pen-Y-Bont, Carmarthen in West Wales, and her collection of poetry Sound Archive (2011) was published by Seren and Cabaret by New Dublin Press in 2017.
