Culture, Welsh Language and Sport Committee

Policy Review - English Medium Writing In Wales

ACADEMI’S response

The Academi welcomes the fact that the Assembly’s Culture, Welsh Language and Sport Committee has chosen to review the often complex and difficult subject of English medium writing in Wales. The nomenclature itself is awkward. There is disagreement as to what it covers. For the majority in Wales the form is actually invisible and this is its major problem. We are excellent at promoting our Welsh language culture. Contemporary activity flourishes. We provide for the future and we celebrate the past. In Welsh language Wales we know who we are. When we speak that is enough. There are no issues of identity. But switch to English, the dominant tongue for 80% of our population and the fog sweeps in. Are we Anglo-Welsh? Are we a colonial extension of England? Do we have anything other than a geographic identity? When we write are we not, as Hay Festival Director Peter Florence insists, all part of a great international literature? And caring comes into it, too. A good many of that 80% simply don’t.Against this background it is little wonder that the medium makes poor progress. We argue over what it includes. Is an internationally known author like James Hawes, who lives in Cardiff although was born outside Wales, engaged in Welsh writing when he authors a novel which he sets in London? When the form was known as Anglo-Welsh Literature both R S Thomas and Emyr Humphreys argued that the Anglo element could not relate to them. They were Welsh writers who happened on this occasion to be using the English language. The label we use today, Welsh Writing in English, is an unsexy mouthful. How do we bring to the wider market something that sounds like the title for an academic textbook? Any professional marketeer will tell you that we need desperately to re-brand. But to what? These problems of nomenclature and definition have a direct effect on audiences. Literature in the Welsh language is automatically nurtured by the community from which it springs. Audience support as a percentage of the relevant population is extremely high. The same cannot be said for Welsh writing in English. Here audiences are small, scattered and in some areas non-existent. When the Academi ran its Bay Lit Festival at venues across Cardiff Bay in 2001 it paralleled everything it did in English with similar events in Welsh. In terms of audience the Welsh events outstripped those in English by a factor of two to one. Cardiff’s Welsh speakers identified directly with the festival. The capital’s often alienated English speakers apparently stayed home to watch TV. Welsh writing in English was clearly not for them. It’s clear that the form faces a severe identity problem. In the bookshop - often the general population’s only contact with literature - Welsh writing in English either is not stocked or is ghettoed among Books of Local Interest: the town in old photographs, charity cookbooks, the history of the district soccer club. It’s a little demeaning for a national literature to find itself stuck in the corner and labelled "local interest". Little wonder that Cardiff author John Williams insists that his books be stocked among the general run of international fiction. I am a writer not a local author, he’ll tell you. This problem of not knowing (in English) who we are, what we are doing or why we are doing it travels on to both the media and to education. In the places where literature might be discussed (newspapers, radio, television) Welsh writing in English is inevitably the junior partner to llenyddiaeth Gymraeg. If it is reviewed at all it is with scant detail and no focus. In a recent issue of the Western Mail the week’s one Welsh title (Pterodactyl’s Wing, an anthology of poetry) was lost among a welter of English historical fiction, American relationship novels and London farce. That weekend on the BBC Welsh writing in English got no mention at all.The problem persists on into education. Few Welsh texts are set. Not enough of the teaching profession (and especially those in Anglicised areas) appear to know anything about the form. That message gets passed on. Our classic writers (Gwyn Jones, Glyn Jones, Jack Jones, Caradoc Evans, Idris Davies) vanish into the mists. Our contemporaries (Robert Minhinnick, Gillian Clarke, Tony Curtis) are paid more attention in England. We are painting here with a broad brush but the strokes all go in the same direction.The Contribution Of English-Medium Books & Writing To Welsh CultureThe contribution is hard to understate. For 80% of the population this is the only native literature they have access to. In its first flowering during Wales’ industrial age Anglo-Welsh literature gave us Jack Jones, Glyn Jones, Gwyn Jones, Gwyn Thomas David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and a host of other writers who marked out what it was to be in a working-class country steaming towards a post-industrialist future. All the grime, toil and beauty of Welsh life as it was - Anglo as well as Welsh - can be found here. Today the industry has gone. The rivers are clean and the hills look different. No one can write like they did again.The second flowering, post War, gave us John Tripp, Roland Mathias, Leslie Norris, Dannie Abse, Alexander Cordell, Harri Webb, R S Thomas, Emyr Humphreys and others who bridged the past into the present. These were the Anglo-Welsh, at least some of them were. Our present-day writers - Gillian Clarke, Des Barry, John Williams, Niall Griffiths, Robert Minhinnick, Tony Curtis, Sheenagh Pugh, Chris Meredith and others have that present to cope with. And it’s hard. (It is interesting to note that down the years casual research into readership has consistently shown that a significant proportion of the audience for Welsh writing in English is the Welsh speaker.) For most people these writers provide the only first-hand written celebration of what we in Wales are. Ignore it and we might as well go join the English midlands. The grants are good there, so they say.The Support Mechanisms Available To Writers In WalesThe support mechanisms available to the writers of Wales and the delivery mechanisms for their writing blur. In the 1970s the poet Raymond Garlick likened the process to an arc which travelled from the producer (the author) to the consumer (the reader). A contemporary version of this arc would include:

• Encouragement for reading
• Training authors to write
• Finding time for them to write
• The establishment of publishers
• Training authors in the publication process
• The appointment of editors to prepare the product for publication
• The appointment of book designers
• The appointment of marketeers
• Support for distribution
• Support to stockholding bookshops
• Support for libraries
• Encouragement for live literature
• Encouragement for books in the press, on radio and TV and on the web
• Encouragement for book buying
• Encouragement for reading

The arc becomes a circle.Almost every stage in the process above has some sort of support mechanism available to it. These range from our national organisations such as the Academi (The Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency), The Welsh Books Council (our distributor and marketeer), Ty Newydd (Wales’ centre for the training of writers), Estyn Allan (the library-centred encourager of reading) through our publishers (Seren, Parthian, Gwasg Gomer & others), our magazines (New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Planet), our Universities (the creative writing MAs and other courses at Lampeter, Carmarthen, Glamorgan, Bangor, Cardiff and Aberystwyth), our library service to local authority run creative writing classes, independent writing groups and the authors themselves.The range of support offered in some cases can be extensive. At the Academi we offer:

1. Critical support
2. Mentoring between publisher and author
3. Advice to writers on markets available to them
4. Bursaries to buy time in which to write
5. Support to schools and others for author visits, workshops and creative writing classes.
6. Support to festivals wishing to promote Live Literature
7. Marketing support for literary events
8. Young People’s Writing Squads
9. Help to publishers with book launches
10. The annual Book of the Year Award

The Academi works to support others in the delivery of its aims. Where there are gaps in the market the Academi adopts a hands-on approach and directly provides. The approach is regional, delivered locally and with attention to the needs of ethnic communities, the geographically and demographically disadvantaged, the young and the old.The Mechanisms For Raising Public Awareness Of English-Medium Welsh Literature And WritersTo raise public awareness we need to achieve three things:

1. Deal with the nomenclature (i.e. rebrand)
2. Develop the market
3. Deliver the product

The first item has little cost implication, the second and third items do. The Academi proposes that Welsh Writing in English and/or Anglo-Welsh Literature be rebranded as Welsh Writing and that Welsh writing in Welsh continues to be known simply as Llen Gymraeg. Attention should also be drawn to the use of the term New Welsh Writing by screen, theatre and script agencies who inevitably take this to mean New Welsh Theatre (or Screen, or script) Writing. For the rest of Wales New Welsh Writing means fiction, novels, poetry, short stories. Users of the term should take care. This all may appear a little like the French desperately using legislation to prevent the continued incursion of English terms into their language and then failing. But at least we should try.Developing the market will include:

1. Supporting the Welsh Books Council’s recent Joint Marketing Strategy
2. Increasing support for bookshops
3. Continuing to support organisations dedicated to increasing readership, such as Estyn Allan.
4. Enhancing the ACW/Academi annual Book of the Year award, Welsh writing in English’s only glittering prize. I use the term advisedly. With current resource the award does not glitter enough.
5. Increasing the total amount of finance available to the Academi for its Writers On Tour scheme (which takes writers directly into schools)
6. Increasing the number of regional fieldworkers working for the Academi. Fieldworkers operate best when run in tandem with a host local authority.
7. Increasing the level of and the number of bursaries available to authors. (Bursaries enable authors to buy time from their normal employment in order to write)
8. Educating the educators
9. Training the trainers
10. Continuing support for our principal literary centres - The Dylan Thomas Centre, Ty Newydd.

Delivering the product will include:

1. Increasing support to Wales’ English language publishers and magazines
2. Developing e-books and ways in which the web can be used as a vehicle for literary product
3. Professionalizing the writers by increasing the levels of fees they can obtain both for the publishing of their work as well as for performing it live

At present the amount of finance available to the Academi both for its Writers On Tour Scheme (the scheme which, in co-operation with local authorities, puts writers into schools) and its Services to Writers (bursaries, mentoring, critical advice) are severely limited. The schemes do not offer market rates to their writers (writers from England demand and regularly get higher fees) and, because of financial limitations, do not reach every school in Wales. The services are regularly oversubscribed and in the case of the mentoring and critical services massively so.Barriers and OpportunitiesMuch of this paper so far has concentrated on the barriers to the development of Welsh writing in English: invisibility, poor media attention, low rates of pay amount practitioners. The opportunities for development, however, are many. In addition to the items listed in Developing The Market (above) the Academi draws your attention to the following:

1. With the recent publication of novels by Des Barry, Niall Griffiths, John Williams, Anna Davis, James Hawes, Sean Burke & others London publishers are for the first time in over thirty years showing a commercial interest in the literary output of Wales. Active attention should be paid to the further commercial promotion of these and others novelists by the mounting of a series of Wales Writes events at bookfairs at home and aboard.
2. The benefits to Welsh culture and Welsh writing should be exploited by financing new literary components to Wales’s many festivals.
3. Welsh writing in English should be at the forefront of Cardiff’s 2005 fifty years a capital one hundred years a city celebrations.
4. The steadily increasing number of Welsh authors translated into European languages should be enhanced by expanding Mercator, the Welsh agency largely responsible.
5. The Assembly should respond positively to the Academi’s initiative of 2000 when it called for the creation of the Poet Laureate for Wales, funded directly by the Assembly with an office in Cardiff Bay. The Welsh Poet Laureate would have a brief to act as an ambassador for Welsh culture, to record our national events and to seek to include writing in as many official publications as possible.
6. The links between Welsh writing in English and the tourist trade (see below) are underdeveloped. Resource should be directed towards the further establishment of literary trails, the installation of plaques and memorials to our great writers of the past (as pioneer by the enterprising Rhys Davies Trust) and to literary museums, exhibitions and other tourist destinations. The only real example we have of this in Wales at present is the excellent Dylan Thomas exhibition and related activities in Swansea.

Links With Other SectorsLinks between Welsh writing in English and the education sector are long established. Many of the colleges of Wales either run creative writing courses or critical strands which relate to Welsh writing in English. Both Swansea and Glamorgan have specialised (with CREW, the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales established by Prof M Wynn Thomas at Swansea).Primary and Secondary schools are both heavy users of the Academi’s Writers On Tour scheme which offers advice and financial assistance in bringing writers and storytellers into the class.Academi is occasionally asked to fund visits by writers to local authority organised inset days (teaching the teachers) although far less frequently than we would like.The links between Welsh writing in English and the tourist industry are weak and ripe for development. At Swansea there are excellent facilities (the Dylan Thomas Centre) and established literary walking trails and connected car and bus tours linked to other Dylan Thomas sites (Laugharne and further west). In the south Wales valleys local authorities have banded together to develop Cordell Country, a series of interpretative walks and tours based around the works of Alexander Cordell. Nobody has done much (or anything) yet for R S Thomas, Jack Jones, Gwyn Thomas and the other greats of the Anglo-Welsh canon.The evident support by the WTB for the Hay Festival shows the valuable past literature can play in attracting visitors. Local authorities and others across Wales are only just waking up to the economic impact of the arts. Further exploitation of this strand is overdue.Academi has begun to develop links between local authorities, local transport providers and community groups with its various Poems In Public Places schemes. These seek to publish as posters a mix of writing drawn from the great and good, the contemporary active and the new. The posters are displayed in public places: libraries, trains, buses, doctor’s surgeries, supermarkets, etc as resources allow. The University of Glamorgan very successfully used a version of this scheme when it put poems in English on Valley Line trains.Should New Writing Or The Classics Should Have Greater Priority?The Academi believes they should be treated equally.How Would Support For Maintaining Classic English Medium Welsh Writing Best Be ManagedWe have a history in Wales of, on the one hand, allowing our great books to either go completely out of print or to be available only in £40 hardback complete text version. On the other hand we bring back classics in budget editions but make no provision for either for delivering those books to market or for creating the market in the first place. There are many past examples of money being spent on reprints which subsequently remain unread, mouldering in the warehouses of publishers.It is vital that links be established between the works themselves and their readers. Texts should be included on school curricula. Lectures, media profiles, critical works and even films should be seed-funded and co-ordinated. Examples of the work itself should be included in appropriate Literature In Public Places ventures and featured in literary festivals. And, vitally, in a co-ordinated fashion budget-priced editions of the relevant works should be brought back into print. If demand can be created then our bookshops will play their part in sales and distribution. One of the best-selling reprints of a classic text across the decades has been Gomer’s sensibly priced paper Collected Poems by Idris Davies. Davies has benefited by being both working class and accessible. His poetry was featured on early Welsh Arts Council poster poems, included in anthologies, popularised by lectures and ultimately by the politician Neil Kinnock who declared to the wide world that Idris was his favourite poet. Sales followed and continue so to do. The Academi runs an Idris Davies celebratory night at Ystrad Mynach in September, 2003. As ever we expect a big crowd. The Idris Davies example can be repeated with the works of other authors so long as it is accompanied by co-ordinated promotion.Academi recommends the ring-fencing of new monies specifically to promote our classic authors and the Welsh Books Council and the Academi jointly be tasked with co-ordinating the spend.ConclusionOur national identity is clearly stronger in the twenty-first century than it was in the second half of the twentieth. Wales can observe England squabbling about who and what it is from a higher ground. Our secure bi-cultural identity, however, is not agreed on by all and the way we treat our literatures is an obvious manifestation of that dissent. This is problem that the Assembly should address. The Assembly should:

1. Enhance the funding available to our principal literary Agencies - The Academi and the Welsh Books Council - with a specific and detailed brief to enlarge the audience for and the acceptance and practice of Welsh Writing In English.
2. Increase support for Ty Newydd, our principal residential training centre, with a brief to increase the number of courses offered that concentrate on Welsh Writing In English.
3. Finance a Welsh day again at the Hay Festival
4. Appoint a Poet Laureate for Wales
5. Increase the value and visibility of the annual Book of the Year Award
6. Ensure that Welsh Writing in English - both classic cannon and contemporary work - is taught in our schools
7. Encourage co-operation between our literary agencies, our local authorities and the Wales Tourist Board in the enhancement of literature’s tourist potential.
8. Facilitate access to Welsh Writing in English by young people through enhanced training.
9. Seek to professionalize our writers by increasing payments made to them in respect of both literature and publication.

Peter FinchChief Executive: Academi21/08/2003