Amy Dillwyn

Katie Gramich

This novel is based on the true events of an attack on a turnpike during the notorious Rebecca Riots in South Wales during the 19th century, and on written records of a magistrate involved in policing the riot. A markedly different account from other tales of the riots in that the account is told more from the perspective of the young rioters involved rather from that of those condemning them. First published in 1880, this is a new addition to the Honno Classics Series, and includes an introduction from Katie Gramich discussing its importance today.

A Story of Killay Life

The Rebecca Rioter

Kate Roberts

Snowdonia, 1880, and Jane Gruffydd is a newcomer to the district, dressed to the nines and almost fainting in the heat of the prayer meeting out on the mountainside. In the pages of this classic 1936 novel, we see the passionate and headstrong Jane grow up and grow old, struggling to bring up a family of six children on the pittance earned by her slate-quarrying husband, Ifan. -- Welsh Books Council

Feet in Chains

A collection of critical essays on new Welsh writing.

Almanac

All of Gwerful Mechain’s known work is included here—as are several poems of uncertain authorship, and a selection of other works that help to fill in the historical and literary context. Each medieval Welsh poem is provided in the original language and in two different translations—a literal translation and a second, freer translation, with rhyme patterns approximating those of the original.

A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition

The Works of Gwerful Mechain

This book may be considered as the second stage in the crucial campaign to raise the profile of Welsh writing in English both within Wales and in the wider world. The first stage was the foundation of the Library of Wales series, which was strongly advocated by all academics in the field of Welsh writing in English. Now that these largely forgotten works have been republished, it is possible for us to use them for teaching purposes in universities. We are left with the problem that critical material on these texts is scarce and, in some cases, non-existent. There is a demonstrable need on the part of undergraduate and postgraduate students for a critical book focusing specifically on a range of Library of Wales titles which will both introduce them to the field of twentieth-century Welsh fiction in English and demonstrate the varying critical approaches that can be used to analyse these texts. The book is a multi-authored work with its origins in the Association for Welsh Writing in English, and includes essays by both established leaders in the field, such as Professors Knight, Thomas, and Brown, and new, cutting-edge research by young scholars at the outset of their academic careers, such as Morse, Wainwright, and Hendon.

Critical Approaches to Welsh Fiction in English

Mapping the Territory

Kirsti Bohata

Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being ‘rediscovered’ by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans’s extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

Marginality, Gender and Illness

Rediscovering Margiad Evans

This collection of essays rediscovers and reassesses the extraordinary literary legacy of the border writer, Margiad Evans (1909-48) - novelist, poet, short story writer and autobiographer.

When the Welsh writer Kate Roberts died in 1985 at the age of 94, the Times obituary noted that 'she was felt by many to rank with Maupassant as one of the leading European short story writers'. Roberts is widely acknowledged as the major twentieth-century novelist and short story writer to have written in the Welsh language, being known and revered in Wales as 'the Queen of our Literature'. Much of her work has been translated into English and other languages and yet she remains today relatively little known and under-appreciated in comparison, for example, with other female contemporaries who wrote in English, such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen. This volume seeks to redress the balance, bringing the life and work of this extraordinary novelist, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and ardent political campaigner to the attention of the wider world audience that the sheer quality of her writing deserves.

Katie Gramich

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