Library of Wales news

AS a 10-year-old schoolboy growing up in Barry, my literary role models were Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard and JBG Thomas.

By the time I got to university I had moved up a few gears: Dostoevsky and Herman Melville now headed my list, but I still couldn’t shake off the influence of the Western Mail’s chief rugby writer.

JBG’s pulsating account of the Lions’ first Test in South Africa in 1955 still vied with young Jim Hawkins’ threat to blow Israel Hands’ brains out as one of the most gripping pieces of narrative I had ever read.

By now too – this was the mid-60s – Clive was kicking, Lynn was leaping, and the great Ali was floating and stinging, but nothing I read seemed to capture the essence of their heart-stopping drama, their meanings or their significance, to an audience in the Wales I knew that was passionate about sport.

Ali’s brilliance would soon be elucidated by a fistful of serious American writers, headed by the bruising Norman Mailer, but nearer home, my historian’s instinct was that a mix of restrictive social and cultural factors had hindered our leading Welsh writers from embracing sport as part of their creative landscape to quite the same degree. Right?

Wrong. As I began working on my “sport” anthology, commissioned for the Welsh Assembly Government’s Library of Wales, I soon found further confirmation of what I had in fact long known.

There was writing on Welsh sport that was vivid and resonant – the poems and memoirs of Bluebirds fan Dannie Abse, Leslie Norris’ poignant evocations of Merthyr’s unique boxing culture, the powerful novels of Rhondda’s Ron Berry, the brilliant short stories of Alun Richards, the stylish journalism of John Morgan and Geoffrey Nicholson, and the perceptive gaze of outside observers such as John Arlott and Hugh McIlvanney.

In my anthology you will find celebrants, cynics and critics, songsters and storytellers, balladeers and brawlers.

Naturally the major spectator sports are well represented, sometimes in unexpected fashion – a John Toshack poem, not about him but by him – other times in the imaginative reconstructions of novelists such as Richard Llewellyn, Alexander Cordell and Emyr Humphreys.

And don’t think this is solely a male preserve. Watch prize-winning poet Sheenagh Pugh clear the snooker table, read Gwyneth Lewis on golf and Western Mail columnist Carolyn Hitt on Joe Calzagh, pictured – some palpable hits there all right.

The volume actually kicks off with one splendidly vitriolic anti-Welsh outburst, but thereafter the mood is more festive: no doubting Thomases, only Dylan, Gwyn and, yes, JBG on that first Test in 1955.

It wasn’t finding material to include that was difficult, but what to leave out.

Was there room for Dai Smith’s memorable description of the kicking Clive – the exhorting, hectoring, chivvying, wily top cat of Cwmtwrch – as “this Welsh Bilko”?

Library of Wales series editor Dai may be, but no, there wasn’t. What about the leaping Lynn? Gerald Davies, as incisive on paper as he was on the wing, rounds off a tribute to one of our greatest athletes, “In Tokyo’s gloom Lynn Davies left the vivid air signed with his honour.”

Nice one, Gerald; you’re in.

Here are dogs and darts, fur and feathers, climbers and cricketers, two- and four-legged runners, racers on wheels and in the water, speedsters on sand and in the sky.

And there’s one gem here you will discover for the first time, an unpublished short story by our foremost cultural critic Raymond Williams.

There has long been a need for an anthology of Welsh sports writing that would reflect the best of it. Here it is.

Sport: An Anthology, edited by Gareth Williams, is published by Parthian Books for the Library of Wales, £9.99. Gareth Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Wales at the University of Glamorgan

Written by: Gareth Williams
Saturday, November 17, 2007
source: Western Mail
web site: icwales.co.uk

Professor Dai smith has one of the most impressive CV’s in Wales. He talks to Cathryn Ings about his latest role as editor of a new series of forgotten classics of Welsh literature.

Professor Dai Smith has had many distinguished careers. Most people would have been proud to have done one of the jobs he has done and excelled in. Check out his CV- Prof Smith is currently the Raymond Williams Chair in the Cultural History at Swansea University.

Before this he was Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Generation at the University of Glamorgan.

He was editor of BBC Radio Wales and Head of Programmes (English Language) at BBC Wales from the early 1990’s to the year 2000.

There was another professorship before this, this time at Cardiff University.

Prof Smith has a BA from Oxford and an Ma from Columbia University, New York.

He has recently (and controversially) been appointed interim head of the Arts Council for Wales.

Quite a distinguished career, you might say.

“I’ve been lucky, in that sense” said Prof Smith. “It’s been partly luck that in Wales, maybe in cultural terms, you tend to do more than one job because there aren’t that many of us that have gone around really talking about Wales.”

Prof Smith’s most recent project is editing the new Library of Wales series.

This is a selection of classic Welsh books written in the English language that have gone out of print.

In this Assembly-backed initiative, the books have been re-printed with trendy new covers so they can be made to a generation of new readers.

They include the boxing classic So Long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry; Border Country by Raymond williams, The Dark Philosophers by Gwyn Thomas, and industrial classics Cwmardy and We Live, by Clydach Vale author Lewis Jones. Each of the books has been given a new introduction, written by a well-known public figure.

Popular urban novelist Niall Grifiths introduces So Long, Hector Bebb; Prof Smith himself has written the foreward to Border Country; Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape, introduces The Dark Philosophers, and Hywel Francis, Aberavon MP, introduces Cwmardy and We Live, which are published together for the first time.

The series, published by leading Welsh independent publishing house Parthian, is edited by Prof Smith.

A set of the books has been given free to every secondary school in Wales.

“I think I was personally involved because, although I am a historian, I’ve written extensively about literature written in English about Wales, so it wasn’t exactly a million miles away from where my interests have lain,” he said.

“The actual impulse was that the Culture Committee of the Welsh Assembly Government was taking evidence about the provision of English language writing in Wales.”

“They were increasingly persuaded that there was insufficient- not so much for contemporary writing but for classics.

“I don’t like the term classics because it sounds a bit off-putting,” said Prof Smith. “They are really works which, I think, are of significance about Wales, mostly written in the last century, mostly written by Welsh people, but which are either currently unavailable or out of print.

“If a classic is Dylan Thomas or RS Thomas, Dannie Abse or even How Green Was My Valley? They wouldn’t be rushed into print by the Library of Wales because they are already available.

“So it’s complementary to the work that is elsewhere. The women’s press Honna, for example, they have done terrific work in bringing women’s literature back into print.”

So of all the out-of-print Welsh classics available, how did Prof Smith choose to publish first?

“I was asked by the minister Alan Pugh if I would look into the feasibility of a Library of Wales-what did it mean, what would it cost, was it sustainable and so on,” Prof Smith explained.

“I convened a small committee-experts in the field-we met and rapidly came up with 40 or more books. There were technical issues such as who owns copyright, how much does it cost, what should we do first.

“It was a little bit of a lottery as to what books came out of the shake first.

“But my own personal opinion is that Border Country by Raymond Williams is one of the finest novels written in English in the 20th century in Britain, let alone Wales. And it hasn’t been in print for about 10 or 15 years. So it was an obvious choice for me, particularly as I’m writing about Raymond Williams.

“Country Dance by Margiad Evans, is a wonderful, beautiful-looking little book-it has been described as the Welsh Wuthering Heights. And it was a prominent novel by a woman.

“Lewis Jones (author of Cwmardy and We Live) is really there because we took the bold decision to put the two together. They are works of some impact.

“Gwyn Thomas’s The Dark Philosophers is three novellas, one of which I think is a European masterpiece. Gwyn taught me in school, and I’m a great admirer of his.

“So Long, Hector Bebb was chosen because it was ready and available.

So what sort of response has the Library of Wales received from the book buying Welsh public?

“It’s been terrific- we have been thrilled with the response so far. Apart from the launch in Cardiff and then in New York- where up to 1000 copies of two of the volumes have been taken- the public response has been amazing.

“We’ve printed everything, I think, twice, and Border Country by Raymond Williams has gone into its third re-print which means 3,500 to 4,000 copies. I think this is unprecedented in Anglo-Welsh publishing.

“We hope that this will continue for the next 10 years and we will rise to 100 books.

“I think they have received a good critical attention, but my dream is that they get a good popular reception and, so far, with the first five, people are buying them.”

So does Prof Smith feel Welsh classics in the English language have been overlooked in the past?

“It’s not so much that they have been overlooked but that when their moment ended, unlike comparable works of Scottish, Irish, certainly English literature, they haven’t been kept, even in a niche area.

“I accept the word “overlooked” if it means we can bring them back into sight.”

Prof smith was born in Tonypandy. He went to Balliol Collge, Oxford where he studied History and then on to Columbia University in New York to study literature.

“It was supposed to be for a year, but I was there for four years.”

At this point, in the late 1960s, Professor Smith was sent a book on Merthyr working class history edited by Glanmor Williams from Swansea University.

“I was so entranced by this I felt that I really wanted to come home,” said Prof Smith.

“I wanted to work in that field so I came to Swansea, which I didn’t know as a town. I deliberately went to Swansea to do my PhD because it was undoubtedly the centre for the new social history of Wales.

“I loved Swansea, I had a fantastic time there. I thought the city was incredibly beautiful then, I still do.”

Over the years Prof Smith’s work has taken him away from Swansea but now he’s back again. He works at the centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (crew) at the university.

“My job initially will be to write my work on Raymond Williams, to bring into print two of his unpublished works- precursors to Border Country- which I discovered in his papers.”

Prof Smith has been working on Raymond Williams papers, which have been deposited at Swansea University, for several years.

So what is the fascination with Raymond Williams?

“It’s two-fold. When I first came across him, I must have been in school. Williams was born in 1921 in Abergavenny. He was the quintessential working class scholarship boy who goes to Cambridge because the school masters sent him.

“He took a long time to discover that not only does his climbing the ladder out of his class not satisfy him politically in terms of his beliefs, but also that it is part of a wider British pattern of cultural dislocation of working class boys and girls which has been going on since the industrial revolution.

“He breaks the back of narrow literary studies” Prof Smith continued. “He more or less invented-he was certainly at the forefront- of what could be called cultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s.

“And he does it in a way which is very personalised from his experience. And to that I could relate personally but I can also relate to it intellectually.

“The second reason is that he is a novelist. To anybody who has not read Border Country, I would say it is a work which is both lyrically and intellectually challenging. It is a wonderful novel.”

Prof Smith got to know Raymond Williams quite well. “I liked him a lot. He was very different from your gung-ho Valleys Welshman. Very different from me. He was rather quiet and certainly not your verbose, eloquent short-arse.

“A man of his great integrity- he sustained his arguments throughout his life. I think he is one of the great, great intellectual figures of the 20th century. I think he is of European and even world stature.”

Prof Smith is obviously dedicated to Welsh literature and believes it has an important role to play in the future of Wales.

“You can’t have a society that develops and evolves if it doesn’t posses a sense of itself. And that sense of itself has to be, in the end, historical. But that history is conveyed in all sorts of ways- in architecture, by painting, by music, by popular memory and by writing about Wales.

“It is the memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, poems, plays, and, above all else, short stories and novels that show us how welsh life was experienced. Not how we would study it but how we experience it. That is the poem of Wales that I have always wanted to express.”

As well as literature, Prof Smith has another great love- sport.

“Like most South Walians! My wife says I’ll watch anybody kicking a ball and it’s true. I was a big rugby fan and I love soccer as well.”

He has co-written, with old friend Gareth Williams, a book on rugby- Fields of Praise, which is a history of the Welsh Rugby Union. Fields of Praise went on to win much critical acclaim and scooped several literary prizes.

“It was a very daunting book to write but very exciting,” said Prof Smith.

“When I ask if there is anything else he’d like to accomplish in his life he says: “Play outside half for Wales!”

If anybody can do it, Prof Smith can!

Written by: Cathryn Ings
Thursday, July 13, 2006
source: South Wales Evening Post
web site: http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/southwalesnews.html

The Library of Wales is an ambitious project that will bring back to print a long list of English-language classics from Wales. Aimed at the general reader the initial list of titles will include volumes by Gwyn Thomas, Raymond Williams and the Rhondda writer Ron Berry. The first five books in the series will be published in January 2006.

'Too many of the best works by Welsh writers have been out of print for too long,’ said Kirsti Bohata on behalf of the Welsh Books Council who will oversee the project. ‘This high-profile project is intended not only to encourage greater educational take-up of these important books but to make an immediate impact on the public imagination in this country and abroad. We are confident that the publicity surrounding the project will also be seen as a further boost to Welsh Writing in English.’

The concept of the Library of Wales series was initially discussed during the National Assembly’s Culture Committee review of Welsh Writing in English and it is supported by additional financial funding from the Welsh Assembly Government. Alun Pugh, the Minister for Culture, Welsh Language and Sport, said: ‘The Library of Wales is a great opportunity for us to celebrate our literary heritage. These books are not remote, academic studies, but works of popular interest that will appeal to readers on many different levels. The Library of Wales will revive interest in our literary classics as well as giving fresh impetus to promoting new English-language writing from Wales.’

Professor Dai Smith will act as the Series Editor on the project, directing the list and commissioning special introductions for each book. He said, ‘The Library of Wales will keep in print the English-language literature of Wales in ways that will connect our past to our present. It will be an essential tool in the self-understanding required to build an emergent Wales. The world will note how we now sustain our common memory through literature and will share in our riches.’

Dr Richard Davies, Managing Director of Parthian added: ‘We are delighted to have been awarded this major project and look forward to the challenge of publishing a landmark series of books that represent some of the best writing produced in Wales. These are good books and we want them to be read and enjoyed.’

Written by: Elwyn Jones
Sunday, September 25, 2005
source: Welsh Books Council
web site: www.cllc.org.uk/whatsnew_librarywales.htm
email: elwyn.jones@cllc.org.uk

Publisher Richard Davies brings a first-hand experience to dealing with the trials and tribulations of his authors. As a novelist and playwright he has lived through the long years of poetry and struggle a writer often needs to establish a reputation.

He worked as a labourer on a building site to finance his first books.

His publishing career grew out of a problem he shared with most young writers-how to get your work into print. When he could not find a publisher in London or Wales for his first novel he published it himself, hawking it around Wales’ bookshops.

The company he founded then, Parthian, has become one of the most innovative book publishers in Wales. It has established a cutting-edge reputation for rooting out promising talent. Among those whose work first appeared in his lists is Rhondda-born Rachel Tresize whose astonishingly raw and powerful memoir, In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl won her an Orange Futures Prize. She was still in her teens when she wrote the book.

Parthian has done much to promote the work of an emerging group of short-story writers. It has brought some of our best and most neglected playwrights a new audience by publishing their texts. Now, along with others in Wales, it is pioneering new links with the literature of Europe and the World.

It will soon be launching a new translation of Under the Dust, a novel by the Catalan writer, Jordi Cocoa, at a press conference in Barcelona. It tells the story of a boy growing up in the city under the dictator Franco.

At the beginning of June in the same city, Parthian is launching The Colour of a Dog Running Away, by Richard Gwyn, its poetry editor. It is a vibrant, poetic evocation of a love affair set in the Catalan capital. Its author speaks Catalan.

A chance meeting at the Frankfurt Book Fair between Richard Davies and the publisher Keri Hulme, the New Zealand winner of the 1985 Booker Prize, could lead to Parthian publishing a book of Maori short stories. It will be edited by Hulme, the author of The Bone People.

“He saw that, like his company, we produce collections of short stories,” recalls Richard Davies as we sit in a bar with a panoramic view of the breathtaking Teifi estuary near Cardigan. “So he said, ‘let’s do a book together’.”

Parthian has also pioneered English translations of major Welsh-language writers. From Empty Harbour to White Ocean was Robin Llywelyn’s own translation of his book O’r Harbwr Gwag I’r Cefnfor Gwyn which won the national Eisteddfod prose medal at Neath in 1994.

The company Richard Davies ran with his artist wife Jill, doing everything from writing the books to designing them and selling them out of a suitcase, now employs half-a-dozen people. They include a fiction editor, a poetry editor and a marketing manager.

Davies and Parthian have just clinched what could be the most important opportunity in the short history of English-language publishing in Wales. It has won the contract to publish the Library of Wales which will be funded by the Welsh Assembly.

The library, edited by historian and literary critic Professor Dai Smith, will bring back into print a series of 20th century classics written in English which are currently out of print and/or extremely difficult to obtain.

The aim is to restore to the reading public some of the key texts which shaped the unique contribution made by the English-language literature to Wales and the world. The open-ended commitment could run into scores of books.

Dai Smith and his panel of five have already chosen the first 20 titles to be resurrected.

They range from books by major literary figures such as Gwyn Thomas, Rhys Davies, Alun Lewis, Glyn Jones, Emyr Humphreys and Jack Jones to lesser known novelists and short story writers whose work has all but slipped from our collective memory.

The second category includes men like Geraint Goodwin George Ewart Evans and, perhaps, Lewis Jones.

According to Dai Smith, the library should prove that Welsh writing in English in the 20th century can compare with anything produced by Ireland, Scotland or England. “What we have here is a superb European literature that is largely unknown, even in Wales,” he said as he unveiled the library’s first 20 titles. He added that it would allow the people of Wales “to have a sense of themselves.”

According to Richard Davies, there will be a more specific benefit to the creation of the library.

“I think Wales will produce better writers as a result of the publication of these books,” he says.

“There are some authors you need to read to help you develop as a writer. Previous writers can help you explore where you are from in literary terms and help to shape your work.”

He mentions the miner-writer BL Coombes who, in books like These Poor Hands, described his life in the coal industry in the Neath Valley. “It would have been interesting for me as a 15-year-old growing up in the same valley to read his books. But I only learned about him in the last four or five years,” Richard Davies says. As the grandson of a miner, Coombes’s work has direct relevance to his life.

Every school and college in Wales is expected to take copies of the Library of Wales books. But, if it is to achieve its purpose, it will have to sell well to the general public.

Pricing, design, and marketing will play crucial roles in ensuring the popularity of the books. Parthian has priced each of the first books at a very reasonable £6.99.

The first five in the series will be published in January next year. They will include the novel Border Country, written by the influential philosopher and critic, Raymond Williams. Another will be So Long, Hector Bebb by the Rhondda author Ron Berry, a novel which explores the dangerous world of boxing in South Wales.

Each book will be introduced by an enthusiast. In Ron Berry’s case, the prize-winning novelist Niall Griffiths will provide the induction.

Niall, whose novel Stump won last year’s Welsh Book of the Year title, has publicly acknowledged his debt to the Rhondda writer.

The covers of these first will be bold and starkly modern. They will often be built around eye-catching, sombrely realistic black and white photographs. They demand a modern audience for these classic texts and they help to give the books an immediacy which dispels any lingering misgivings that they are ghosts conjured up from a dead tradition.

Richard Davies, 38, is the son of a Neath builder. He lives in a large and imposing house with Jill and their children Tai, eight, and Ella, five, in the centre of Cardigan. It is, not surprisingly, full of books and Jill’s vibrant, arresting paintings.

He loves the sociability of publishing in which he meets a stream of very different but like-minded people. He delights in discovering and encouraging new talent and seeing it in print. He has often backed it with his own money without the benefit of grants.

He has inherited a business talent from his father and enjoys writing complex business plans. His ambition is to grow the company beyond the confines of Wales or the United Kingdom. And he has the vision to achieve that ambition. There are precedents. He points to the Scottish-based companies like Cannongate which have won international reputations.

He has already put into place a network of distributors enabling him to sell books in the United States as well as Europe.

“Our challenge as publishers is to promote out authors and win a larger audience for them. We have to try to be a company with a world perspective, to sell books in numbers in the States and in Europe.”

The difference between being a small provincial company and one with international clout can rest on the success of a handful of books.

“You can turn things round and earn a place in the international market with two or three successful books” says Richard.

He admits that he needs to lay his hands on more good books which have the chance of selling all over the world.

Some years he may handle just one or two books with that potential. “What you need is five or six a year so that you can promote them heavily. Then one might take off.”

His enthusiasm for publishing is obvious. But he is determined not to neglect his first love, writing. He is a past winner of the Rhys Davies short story award. His first novel, Work, Sex and Rugby, written in 1992 under the pseudonym he uses as a writer, Lewis Davies, is a rite of passage story describing one young man’s story through a weekend of booze, rugby and women. Two years ago it was voted the best book to describe Wales in a poll organised to coincide with World Book Day.

A later novel, My Piece of Happiness, a sensitive and moving account of a social worker’s relationship with his handicapped charge, won critical acclaim. He has also written a number of plays, sometimes adapting his novels for the stage. He has just finished a political satire which updates the story of King Arthur’s Camelot by relocating it to Blair’s cabinet.

Richard Davies believes he can juggle the demands of running an expanding business with those of being a successful writer in at least two very different fields. He already has the next decade of his life mapped out.

During that time he will not only steer Parthian to further success. He will write at least two novels, one of which could be a thriller, and have a play produced on the West End stage. It would take a brave man to bet against him.

Written by: Mario Bassini
Monday, August 01, 2005
source: Western Mail