Bookcase Focus: An interview with Llŷr Gwyn Lewis

Bookcase Focus: An interview with Llŷr Gwyn Lewis

26 May 2015

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Wales Literature Exchange interviewed our Bookcase author Llŷr Gwyn Lewis ahead of his journey to the European Festival of the First Novel held in Kiel between 28 - 31 May 2015.

What first inspired you to become a writer, and where do your ideas come from?

It was poetry, more than anything else, that I was drawn to as a child. Early influences were Gerallt Lloyd Owen and Hedd Wyn – the romance of it all I suppose. I drifted away from this during my teens and when I came back to poetry I found it too romantic in one way or another. Only recently in my prose have I started to return to explore those ideas. I owe a great deal to my family, to my parents, of course. Though Caernarfon, where I was brought up, doesn’t figure as prominently in my writing as Cardiff, where I now live, does, it’s always there in the background somehow. Writing on place needs one location as an anchor, I think, and Caernarfon is as much of an anchor in my prose as it is in my life.

I used to write a lot of love poetry of some kind or another, but I suppose recently that writing about place has become more of an interest. Some people have commented that I don’t often write in an overtly political manner. It’s there in the background, but like many writers of my generation I find it difficult to commit to a certain political stance or ideology (apart from the default ‘the Welsh language must be saved’ viewpoint that naturally characterises most writing in Welsh). Irony and ambivalence is just easier nowadays. Exploring that difficulty, or reluctance, however, can in itself be fruitful ground for writing.

How would you describe your writing?

Quiet, hopefully. Though recently I’ve felt the need to do a little more shouting – we’ll see how that goes. I suppose I enjoy taking a metaphysical approach to writing – taking an idea or conceit and trying to take it or develop it in certain directions.

Which authors have influenced you the most?

Strangely it was reading Philip Larkin that brought me back to poetry during my late teens. Through him I discovered many other poets, and through him too I found my way back to Welsh poetry, falling in love with it again. That has been great, in recent years reading poets like Twm Morys, Emyr Lewis and Iwan Llwyd as though for the first time - in a way I find it refreshing that I didn’t get drunk on them while I was at school. Reading Myrddin ap Dafydd’s ‘Llwybrau’ at university was a real revelation in terms of the possibilities of cynghanedd. Sometimes I turn to Irish writers, and Yeats is a constant source of inspiration. Bernard O’Donoghue I think is one of the finest poets writing in English today.

In prose I suppose that W. G. Sebald’s influence on Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel is undeniable. But there are others too: Hemingway certainly, Milan Kundera, I like the little quirks, long flowing rhythms (in poetry and prose), and a given text’s ability to transport someone to a different place/time. If I could achieve those things satisfactorily in my own writing, I think I’d be very happy.

But most importantly I think is that a broad range of writers influence me in different ways, depending on what I want to say and how I want to say it. The idea of ‘your own voice’ still prevails to a great degree, so when I wrote Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel in quite an archaic and formal style, people didn’t ask ‘does this style suit the nature and the tone of what’s being explored?’, they just went ‘surely this isn’t how a twenty-something author should be writing’.

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

On a personal level, I’m still at a very early stage of my writing career. And it’s not that I’m well-known or anything now, it’s just that people have started to…well, to read me, because I’ve published books for the first time. Once that happens, the game changes. You have no excuses any more: he’s young, this is his first book, etc. I think that in Wales, literature has played such a central part in the nation’s cultural and even political life that there is by now a strange sort of pressure on writers to ‘say’ something. Of course every writer wants to do exactly that or s/he wouldn’t be writing. But to know that that expectation is always there, that when something happens one is almost expected to proclaim something about it, is a privilege but also quite a strange feeling. There was talk that devolution might change all of that; but I don’t think that it has, not at all. If anything it’s made it much more difficult. Because now the question of where exactly one should direct one’s vitriol, or at least to whom and on whose behalf one should ‘say’ something, is much more unclear.

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

Making the best of the time available to you. I often grumble nowadays that I have no time to write. But then when I do find a few hours and sit down, I find myself too easily distracted and lacking focus. Making the two happen together is the secret, I think. Unfortunately I’m taken in by the adage that you’re only as good as the last thing you’ve written, which makes for a slightly unhealthy situation where I’m quite restless if I’m not writing regularly. If I could convince myself that time away from writing – living, thinking, storing things, working things out – is equally as important as the act itself, if not more so, then I’d be much happier.

Which writer(s) from Wales would you recommend to readers, and why?

In recent Welsh prose I don’t think that you can find a more accomplished and masterly book than Angharad Price’s O, Tyn y Gorchudd. I’m a great admirer too of Tony Bianchi’s work – a very underrated writer.

In terms of poetry, I think that two brilliant volumes have been published this year, by Rhys Iorwerth (Un stribedyn bach) and Guto Dafydd (Ni Bia’r Awyr). These are two young poets grappling in quite distinct and different ways with the Welsh experience in the twenty-first century. I think that these volumes, through their own very different and accomplished means, really offer hope of new voices, finally, in Welsh poetry, which may eventually emerge from the shadow of the previous generation and take our poetry in a new, post-devolutionary direction.

In English, Patrick McGuinness is a gifted and incredibly precise poet and author. Jilted City is an excellent volume of poetry, and I devoured both of his prose works, The Last Hundred Years and Other People’s Countries. I’ve also read a couple of Eluned Gramich’s short stories and I think that she has a great talent.

Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel (Some Flowers of War) by Llŷr Gwyn Lewis has been selected to the Wales Literature Exchange 2014 - 2015 Bookcase, our annual selection of recent Welsh literary works which we recommend for translation. Read more here.