Wales

Authors from Wales write out of a country with two languages and a short memory for distance: the valley, the farm and the coast sit within an hour of each other. The listings gathered under this tag include Cynan Jones, Fflur Dafydd, Gillian Clarke, Niall Griffiths and Owen Sheers. Between them they cover Welsh-language and English-language writing, poetry and prose, city and countryside. Should you seek Welsh authors rather than writing about Wales, this is the place to begin.

Wales gives you two languages on the shelf. Fflur Dafydd writes in Welsh and in English, and her fiction moves between a contemporary Wales and its older stories without stopping to explain either. Cynan Jones works a smaller map: farms, coast, animals, men who speak little. Niall Griffiths stays with the towns and the people the guidebooks skip. Owen Sheers takes the landscape as a subject in itself, in prose and in verse. Gillian Clarke has spent a writing life on the same ground, and her poems are the clearest place to start if you want the country in a few lines rather than a few hundred pages. England, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own tag here. What separates this one is bilingualism, a rural economy still visible in the fiction, and a short distance between the industrial and the pastoral.