"First, because I feel that here is a specific voice, or rather: a specific range of different voices that are - in the fullness of their relation to place and time - accessible only through the Welsh language (I experienced this for the first time, more than twenty years ago, in reading Kate Roberts' short stories).

Second, because Europe would not be complete without these voices from Wales and from other smaller linguistic regions. Although we have access to so much more information than our parents and grandparents, Europe and the world at large tend to be controlled by fewer and fewer "great languages", while anonymous "market forces" are reducing our attention to an ever narrowing range of human experience.

By an accident of my biography I came to be involved in Welsh language and literature. I feel the responsibility (and the joy) to go on to read and learn more, and, though being a late beginner and a slow worker, to communicate to the readers of my mother tongue what I have discovered."

Professor Wolfgang Schamoni

Read more about Professor Wolfgang Schamoni here.

Read more about the recent Wales Literature Exchange/Schwob residency at Tŷ Newydd in our news section.