Welsh writing in English is a term used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers.

The term 'Anglo-Welsh' replaced an earlier attempt to define this category of writing as 'Anglo-Cymric'.Lewis Davies, 'The Anglo-Cymric School of Poets', Welsh Outlook, 1926 The form 'Anglo-Welsh' was used by Idris Bell in 1922Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales. ed. Meic Stephens, 1986 and revived by Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias when they renamed their literary periodical Dock Leaves as The Anglo-Welsh ReviewEditorial to The Anglo-Welsh Review, 1957 and later further defined the term in their anthology Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980 as denoting a literature in which "the first element of the compound being understood to specify the language and the second the provenance of the writing".Raymond Garlck and Roland Mathias, Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980 (1984), p. 27. Although recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century, Garlick and Mathias sought to identify a tradition of writing in English in Wales going back much further.Raymond Garlick An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (University of Wales Press, 1970) The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because the term 'Welsh Literature' describes Welsh-language literature which has its own continuous tradition going back to the sixth century poem known as Y Gododdin.

Introduction

The phrase "Welsh writing in English" has replaced the earlier "Anglo-Welsh literature" because many Welsh writers in English have felt that the latter usage failed to give "Welsh status to Welsh people who, not speaking Cymraeg, nevertheless do not feel at all English".Stephen Thomas Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. Welsh writers in English in the early twentieth century favoured poetry and the short story over the novel, with some notable exceptions.Glyn Jones, The Island of Apples, (1965). This was for two main reasons: in a society lacking sufficient wealth to support professional writers, the amateur writer was able to spare time only for short bursts of creativity and these forms concentrated linguistic delight and exuberance. Since the main market was London publishers, the early short stories tended to focus on the eccentricities – as seen from a metropolitan viewpoint – of Welsh rural life, though later work focused on life in the industrial valleys of South Wales. A genre of poetry also developed which consciously located itself in association with poetry in the Welsh languageGreg Hill "Drowned Voices", Planet 92,1992. and this emphasis led some writers to question the term "Anglo-Welsh" and favour the alternative "Welsh Writing in English" as emphasising the Welsh provenance rather than the English language. Recently the more neutral term "Anglophone Writing from Wales" has been employed.e.g. by M. Wynn Thomas, Two Rivers from a Common Spring (Welsh Books Council, 2022).

There is no final, clear definition of what constitutes a Welsh writer in English, or Anglo-Welsh author. Obviously it includes Welsh writers whose first language is English, rather than Welsh, such as Swansea born Dylan Thomas (1914–53) and novelist Emyr Humphreys, born in Prestatyn in 1919. But it also includes those born outside Wales with Welsh parentage, who were influenced by their Welsh roots, like London-born poet David Jones (1895–1974). Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues defines the Anglo-Welsh as "those Welsh men and women who write in English about Wales".Jones, Glyn The Dragon Has Two Tongues, p. 37.

In addition, writers born outside Wales, who have both lived in as well as written about Wales, are often included, such as John Cowper Powys (1872–1963), who settled in Wales in 1935 and wrote two major novels, Owen Glendower (1941) and Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (1951), that have Welsh subject matter. In addition to using Welsh history and settings, Powys also uses the mythology of The Mabinogion. He also studied the Welsh language.John Cowper Powys: Letters 1937–54, ed. Iorwerth C. Peate, University of Wales Press: Cardiff,1974, pp. 3–5. Then there is the poet, teacher, and critic Jeremy Hooker (born 1941), who taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1965 to 1984 and became deeply involved in writing about and teaching Welsh writing in English during this time, though he wrote only a few poems with Welsh subject matter. The Liverpool-born novelist James Hanley (1897–1985) lived in Wales from 1931 until 1963 and was buried there. Hanley published, Grey Children: A Study in Humbug and Misery (1937), a study of unemployment in industrial South Wales and three novels set in Wales.See Don Quixote Drowned (1953); The Welsh Sonata (1954); A Stone Flower (1968); Another World (1972); A Kingdom (1978). As one writer notes: "a widely debatable area of Anglo-Welsh acceptability exists".Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature: The Twentieth Century, ed. Linda R. Williams. Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 1992, p. 314. Saunders Lewis, the noted Welsh-language poet, novelist, dramatist, and nationalist, in fact rejected the possibility of Anglo-Welsh literature because English is the official language of the British state, affirming that '"the literature which people called Anglo-Welsh was indistinguishable from English literature".Michael J. Collins, "Keeping the Flag Flying: Anglo-Welsh Poetry in the Twentieth Century". World Literature Today, Vol.56, no.1 (Winter 1982); Saunders Lewis, "Is There an Anglo-Welsh Literature". University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 1939. Ironically, Saunders Lewis was himself born in Wallasey in England to a Welsh-speaking family.

The problems are perhaps epitomised by Roald Dahl, a writer of short stories and children's literature. Dahl was born in Wales, to Norwegian parents,Philip Howard, "Dahl, Roald (1916–1990)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 and spent much of his life in England, and the Welsh influence on his work is not always immediately apparent. Thus he might be seen partly as a Welsh analogue to Northern Ireland's C.S. Lewis. Peter George is another example of a writer of Welsh origins who rarely wrote about Wales. Conversely, Eric Linklater was born in Penarth, but is generally considered a Scottish writer.

A further challenge for the definition of Welsh literature in English has come with the globalisation of culture. However, modern Welsh literature in English reflects a multicultural experience.

If a Welsh writer chooses to write in English, this does not mean that they are unable to speak Welsh as well. In some cases, such as Jan Morris or Gillian Clarke, English-language writers have chosen to learn Welsh. In others, a native Welsh speaker such as Siân James or Jo Walton may choose to write some, or all of their work in English. Writing for an English-language market does not necessarily mean that they have abandoned a Welsh language audience.

The beginnings

While Raymond Garlick discovered sixty-nine Welsh men and women who wrote in English prior to the twentieth century,Raymond Garlick, An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature Dafydd Johnston thinks it "debatable whether such writers belong to a recognisable Anglo-Welsh literature, as opposed to English literature in general".A Pocket Guide to the Literature of Wales University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 1994, p. 91 Well into the nineteenth century English was spoken by relatively few in Wales, and prior to the early twentieth century there are only three major Welsh-born writers who wrote in the English language: George Herbert (1593–1633) from Montgomeryshire, Henry Vaughan (1622–1695) from Brecknockshire, and John Dyer (1699–1757) from Carmarthenshire. While some see them as clearly belonging to the English tradition,A Pocket Guide, p. 91. Belinda Humphrey believes that both Vaughan and Dyer are Anglo-Welsh poets because, unlike Herbert, they are "rooted creatively in the Welsh countryside of their birth". Furthermore, she suggests in Vaughan's case the possible influence of the tradition of Welsh-language poetry.Belinda Humfrey, "Prelude to the Twentieth Century", in Welsh Writing in English, ed. M. Wynn Thomas. University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 2003, pp. 5–46. Writers from medieval Wales such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Adam of Usk also used Latin and Norman French, in addition to English and Welsh.

Welsh writing in English might be said to begin with the fifteenth-century bard Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal (?1430 – ?1480), whose Hymn to the Virgin was written at Oxford in England in about 1470 and uses a Welsh poetic form, the awdl, and Welsh orthography; for example:

O mighti ladi, owr leding – tw haf At hefn owr abeiding: Yntw ddy ffast eferlasting I set a braents ws tw bring.

A rival claim for the first Welsh writer to use English creatively is made for the poet, John Clanvowe (1341–1391). Clanvowe's best-known work was The Book of Cupid, God of Love or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. which is influenced by Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale had previously been attributed to Chaucer but the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature notes the absence of direct evidence of that when linking Clanvowe with the work.Robert T. Lambdin, Laura C. Lambdin, Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature (2000), pp. 104–5. The poem is written as a literary dream vision and is an example of medieval debate poetry. A concerto inspired by the poem was composed by Georg Friedrich Handel. It apparently also influenced works by both John Milton and William Wordsworth. Clanvowe also wrote The Two Ways, a penitential treatise.Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991), p. 38.

Foundations The beginnings of an Anglo-Welsh tradition are found by some in the novels of Allen Raine (Anne Adalisa (Evans) Puddicombe) (1836–1908), from Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, whose work, Stephen Thomas Knight proposes, "realised a real, if partial, separate identity and value for a Welsh social culture".A Hundred Years of Fiction, p. 25. (Other possible precursors are Monmouthshire-born Arthur Machen (1863–1947), and Joseph Keating (1871–1934), who began his working life as a South Wales miner.) However, many see the Carmarthenshire-born satirical short-story writer and novelist Caradoc Evans (1878–1945) as the first—or first modern—Welsh writer in English. His short-story collections My People (1915) and Capel Sion (1916) were highly controversial, and Roland Mathias bitterly comments that "No other Anglo-Welsh prose writer. .. displayed such ill will to Wales or to Welsh people".Anglo-Welsh Literature, p. 82. W. H. Davies (1871–1940), born in Newport, became famous principally for his The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp which was set mostly in North America. The principal themes in his work are observations about life's hardships, the ways in which the human condition is reflected in nature, his own tramping adventures and the various characters he met. In his poetry he was particularly inspired by birds, the weather and the seasons. His prose works were nearly all autobiographical and were sometimes, as with his 1918 "A Poet's Pilgrimage (or A Pilgrimage in Wales)", set in his homeland. (See also Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), Edward Thomas (1878–1917) and Joseph Keating (1871–1934).)

In Parenthesis, a modernist epic poem by David Jones (1895–1974) first published in 1937, is probably the best known contribution from Wales to the literature of the First World War.

To a large extent, though not entirely, "The first flowering of Welsh writing in English" was in industrial South Wales and this was linked to the rapid decline in the use of the Welsh language in the twentieth century, especially in this region.A Pocket Guide, p. 102. David Jones and Dylan Thomas are two writers of the 1930s who do not fit into this paradigm.

Early drama