‘Life Writing in Wales’
Gregynog Hall, Newtown, Powys, Wales, SY16 3PW
March 30 - April 1, 2007
In 2006 the Wales Book of the Year awards went to works of life writing: Robert Minhinnick’s autobiographical essays To Babel and Back and Rhys Evans’s biography, Gwynfor: Rhag Pob Brad. But this is not a new phenomenon: both biography and autobiography have had a long hold on the Welsh imagination. In the 19th century the Cofiant/Memoir chronicling the life, works and influence of a range of charismatic Welsh preachers became the genre par excellence for the expression of Welsh religious passion. In the 20th century, the subject of autobiography shifted from the preacher to the worker; texts such as Bert Coombes’ These Poor Hands came to be regarded as the authentic expression of the Welsh industrial experience. Other life writers leant more towards the poetic, the humorous or the fantastical, like Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog or Dannie Abse’s Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve. Meanwhile, poetry itself began to ‘bear witness’ to a life or to give expression to personal memories representative of a whole community; works such as Glyn Jones’s ‘Merthyr’ or David Jones’s In Parenthesis speak of such experiences. Welsh women’s lives have also been eloquently represented in life writing, such as Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-Race, Gillian Clarke’s ‘Cofiant’ and Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate. This conference will be an opportunity to explore this diverse tradition of life writing from Wales and, at the same time, to investigate and theorize the appeal of these most unstable of genres, blurring as they often do the boundaries between fact and fiction, between myth and reality.
March 30 - April 1, 2007
In 2006 the Wales Book of the Year awards went to works of life writing: Robert Minhinnick’s autobiographical essays To Babel and Back and Rhys Evans’s biography, Gwynfor: Rhag Pob Brad. But this is not a new phenomenon: both biography and autobiography have had a long hold on the Welsh imagination. In the 19th century the Cofiant/Memoir chronicling the life, works and influence of a range of charismatic Welsh preachers became the genre par excellence for the expression of Welsh religious passion. In the 20th century, the subject of autobiography shifted from the preacher to the worker; texts such as Bert Coombes’ These Poor Hands came to be regarded as the authentic expression of the Welsh industrial experience. Other life writers leant more towards the poetic, the humorous or the fantastical, like Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog or Dannie Abse’s Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve. Meanwhile, poetry itself began to ‘bear witness’ to a life or to give expression to personal memories representative of a whole community; works such as Glyn Jones’s ‘Merthyr’ or David Jones’s In Parenthesis speak of such experiences. Welsh women’s lives have also been eloquently represented in life writing, such as Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-Race, Gillian Clarke’s ‘Cofiant’ and Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate. This conference will be an opportunity to explore this diverse tradition of life writing from Wales and, at the same time, to investigate and theorize the appeal of these most unstable of genres, blurring as they often do the boundaries between fact and fiction, between myth and reality.
Documentation
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Download the 2007 call for papers here:
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Download the 2007 conference programme and booking form here:
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