The best books about Wales and Welsh culture

I first read the tales of The Mabinogion when I was an undergraduate and their amazing otherness helped to propel me towards a career researching medieval Welsh literature.

These prose tales were composed in Welsh between 1100 and 1300. Four of the tales are linked together and are known as ‘The Four Branches of the Mabinogi’. Other tales include two original Arthurian stories, a dream vision set in the Roman British past, and three tales based on the French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

In this rich mixture of genres, otherworldly women marry heroic men, warfare between Wales and Ireland destroys a generation, and Arthur strides the land as the king of the whole island of Britain. Sioned Davies’s translation is the latest and best, capturing all the drama and apparent simplicity of the original Welsh texts.

M. Wynn Thomas is the foremost literary critic writing in Wales today, and a writer I particularly admire.

He pioneered the concept of ‘Welsh writing in English’ as distinct from ‘Welsh writing’ (in Welsh), honouring the bilingual culture of Wales. Thomas’s twelve poems are selected from three key periods of Welsh history, the Middle Ages, the pre-modern period, and our own time.

Each poem is read in the context of its social and political background, educating us about the politics of Welshness, the cultural assumptions written into the literature, and above all what it means to be Welsh in a nation that is not a state.

This is such an elegant and original way to foreground the creativity of Welsh poets alongside the cultural forces that shaped them.

I’m not particularly a foodie, but this book was an eye-opener.

Carwyn Graves takes us on a historical and topographical journey around Wales uncovering one of its best-kept secrets, its traditional and inventive cuisine. I discovered that there is definitely more to Welsh cooking than the famous Welsh rarebit or even the ubiquitous Welsh cakes (enjoyable though they are).

The book is structured around key foods from the Welsh menu, including Bara/Bread, Caws/Cheese, and Cig Oen/Lamb. The emphasis is on fresh natural foods, though the final chapter on Sglodion/Chips rather gives the game away.

There are a number of anthologies of Welsh poetry in translation, but Tony Conran’s collection remains my favourite.

It is a terrific selection, from the great medieval court poets to the giants of the nineteenth century and the modernist poets of the twentieth century. Well-known poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Waldo Williams rub shoulders with less familiar names, such as Gruffudd ap Maredudd and Alun Llywelyn-Williams.

Some individual poems have their own prefaces explaining their context, while the whole volume begins with a masterly introduction to the Welsh bardic tradition.

As a bonus, the volume concludes with a substantial explanation of the metres of Welsh poetry, so if you are not sure how to tell an englyn from an awdl, this is the book for you.

Pigeon is Alys Conran’s first novel and it exemplifies, for me, the huge energy and potential of the current generation of writers in Wales.

It is not only a powerful story of loss, guilt, and redemption, but a pointed comment on the state of contemporary Wales and its social challenges.

Pigeon’s young adulthood, dominated by a bullying English stepfather, echoes the difficult relationship between the Welsh and the English, while Pigeon’s troubled attitude towards the Welsh language, his birth language, throws up questions about the nature of linguistic identity in a bilingual country.

The novel won the Wales Book of the Year in 2017, has been translated into Welsh, and has been turned into a play, and yet is hardly known outside Wales. Welsh writers like Conran deserve a much wider readership.