Bookcase Focus: An Interview with Christopher Meredith

Bookcase Focus: An Interview with Christopher Meredith

17 Ionawr 2022

Llandefalle 11 Hyd 21

Wales Literature Exchange interviewed our Bookcase author Christopher Meredith about his writing and influences.

1. What first inspired you to be an author and where do your ideas come from?

To quote P.G. Wodehouse (a writer I’m not all that fond of): ‘I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.’ Perhaps it wasn’t quite that early, but it was early enough for it to be hard to remember. I was more interested in drawing than writing for quite a long time, but gazing at and making marks on paper held me from the start. The intense, immersive involvement of reading as I experienced it as a child enthralled me, and the quiet enthralment of making marks on the blank page was much the same thing. Ideas come from everywhere. Try and stop ’em.

2. How would you describe your writing?

I hope that my work’s diverse in genre, form, and even at first glance concerns, but that across the whole a deeper coherence of aesthetic and of themes emerges. Someone once described me as a poet who writes novels and a novelist who writes poems. I wish I’d thought of that.

3. Which authors have influenced you the most?

Influences come from everywhere. It’s a false step to separate literary influences from all the other stuff that shapes your work. The smell of coal fires from my childhood or an ash tree I saw yesterday shedding its leaves can be as significant as some sentences from for instance Joyce or lines from Dafydd ap Gwilym.

4. In your opinion what are the biggest challenges that writers face today – and do you think these challenges have changed since you started writing?

Being any good as a writer is the perennial and most important challenge. Right now, in spite of some headliners and unless you’re a telly celeb, it’s harder than ever to make any money at all out of writing or to get work read. The internet has enabled an assault on intellectual property rights and wholesale theft of authors’ works that have worsened this. With few exceptions, writing from Wales whether it’s in Welsh or English, especially if it’s published in Wales, is largely ignored by the huge Anglophone mainstream. This ignorance in effect makes England a wall between us and the rest of the world.

5. What are the hardest and easiest parts of being a writer?

Writing is hard and the hardest bit’s the next word. And I’m as much in thrall to it as ever and enjoy it more now than ever before.

6. Which writer from Wales would you recommend to readers and why?

Where do I start? If you don’t read Welsh try Gwyn Williams’s The Burning Tree (1956), an anthology of Welsh poetry from the sixth to the sixteenth century in parallel text with Williams’s translations. There may be closer translations now, but this is a vibrant book with a huge range and a brilliantly informative and persuasive introduction.

Glyn Jones’s The Island of Apples (1965) is one of the great novels of childhood, a linguistic tour de force and a brilliantly sustained piece of unreliable first person narrative that breaks the bounds between naturalism and what we’ve come to call magic realism.

Dorothy Edwards is unjustly overlooked. She published two small masterpieces in the 1920s and was dead at thirty. Try the short story collection Rhapsody. Taut, strange, modernist, and unlike any other writing you’ll encounter.

But ask me tomorrow and I’ll pick three different writers.

Both 'Still' and 'Please' are selected to the Wales Literature Exchange 2021–22 Bookcase, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation.