Short stories
My People
Caradoc Evans (David Evans) · 1915
Synopsis
Fifteen stories set in a farming village in the south-west of the country. A father lets his daughter die rather than call the doctor, who would have to be paid. A woman saves for thirty years to give the chapel a harmonium and cannot afford shoes for herself. A pastor embezzles donations. A man locks his wife, who has gone mad, in a cowshed and says she has left. People pray a great deal and give each other nothing.
Context
The book appeared in 1915 and was publicly burned in Wales; libraries withdrew it, newspapers called for prosecution, and its author was nicknamed the most hated man in the country. What he was reproached with was not having lied but having written in English, for the use of the English, what the Welsh already knew. His prose imitates Welsh syntax word for word, which produces a false, resonant language that was at first mistaken for clumsiness. Welsh literature in English dates from this.
Who it is for
Fifteen short stories in English, never translated. The syntax is deliberately faulty and disorients for a few pages.
Prizes and reception
Burned in public on its publication, and regarded since as the first book of a literature that did not exist before it.