AWWE Conference, 2025

I was somewhat surprised, last year, to discover that there was such a thing as the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Jo Lambert told me about it. People at Aberystwyth University were encouraging her to go. It looked like a serious literary event, but I offered them a paper on Nicola Griffith’s Spear and it got accepted, so I went.

I think I had four people in my audience. There were two parallel sessions and the other one had papers about poetry.

On the other hand, the conference takes place in a fabulous location, Gregynog Hall in central Wales. Also I made friends. It turns out that Matt Jarvis, one of the then co-chairs of the Association, knew Farah and Edward well. His fellow co-chair, Kirsti Bohata, gets featured in my report on the Llandeilo Lit Fest. She talked a bit more about Amy Dillwyn at the conference as well.

This year I offered them a paper on the figure of the Lady of the Lake. That was a lot of fun to research, and led me down all sorts of avenues of Welsh folklore. It turns out that lakes in Wales are often inhabited by moistened bints, but rather than handing out magic swords they are far more likely to gift people herds of magic white cows. Which, if you think about it, are probably a lot more useful. If you are going to be at Archipelacon 2 you will have a chance to hear an expanded version of that paper.

The paper seemed to go down very well, and I got some good questions. One in particular came from a Celticist friend, Rhys Kaminsky-Jones. He asked me why it is the Lady of THE Lake. Which Lake? Why does it have a definite article?

I had to admit that I had never thought of that before. Being brought up in Y Gwlad Haf tends to result in your assuming that there is only one Lake, and it is the one that surrounds Glastonbury in the winter. But Rhys asked the question, and the answer came to me in a flash of inspiration. It is a translation from Welsh.

Welsh does not have an indefinite article. There is no ‘a lake’, there is just ‘lake’, but Welsh also puts in a definite article when an English speaker might not expect it. For example, a street which, in English, is called Park Lane, would in Welsh be rendered Lôn y Parc — Lane of the Park. So our mythical woman might be Dynes y LLyn – Woman of the Lake. Or perhaps, as my Welsh tutor suggested, Morwyn y Llyn, if these women were supposed to be virgin priestesses.

There were plenty of interesting papers this year. There was an entire panel on coal mining horror stories. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘underscapes’ so a lot of underground (and underwater) stuff happened. But the other paper I wanted to mention was the one by Aidan Byrne from Wolverhampton University. It was titled ‘Among Others’, and if you guessed that it featured the Jo Walton of that name you would be dead right. It also featured stories of Welsh girls in English boarding schools, which led me to talk to Aidan about the Crater School books.

Slowly but surely we are getting more spec fic content at AWWE. Hopefully I can continue the progress next year, though May 2026 is very busy what with the Senedd elections, Satellite in Glasgow, and Åcon.