FROM BARDSEY NUNS TO ARMED LIBRARIANS – FFLUR DAFYDD SCOOPS TOP WELSH FICTION PRIZE
Exactly two months after her success at the Guardian Hay Festival, where she was named Oxfam Hay Emerging Writer of the Year for her first English novel Twenty Thousand Saints, is yet another prestigious literary prize for Fflur Dafydd. On 4 August, Fflur scooped the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize at the National Eisteddfod of Wales for a controversial Welsh-language novel, Y Llyfrgell (The Library.) This is the second Eisteddfod prize for Fflur, who won the coveted Prose Medal in 2006, and this is also her fourth novel. Fflur was presented with a £5000 cash prize and the Daniel Owen Memorial Medal, as well as receiving a special hard-bound copy of her novel.
The novel, set in 2020, takes a satirical look at one of the most iconic Welsh institutions, the National Library of Wales. It follows a group of characters during one dramatic day when two armed, female librarians take the readers hostage in the reading room. This black comedy's satire targets librarians as well as academics; civil servants, poets, politicians and even porters. The author throws them mercilessly together into a sinister, bizarre, and darkly funny scenario. Its topicality, meanwhile, draws on recent library closures, and it gives an intelligent spin to digitisation and the impending threat of the e-book. Y Llyfrgell presents a world where women have the top jobs, where politicians hold too much sway over what gets published and documented, and it raises important questions about the author's role in a digitised future.
The judges of the competition, John Rowlands, Geraint Vaughan Jones and Rhiannon Lloyd, were unanimous in their decision and commended the author's innovation and ingenuity, describing Fflur's novel as “brimful of humour, unforgettable characters, and an excellent narrative”. The novel marks out a new genre in Welsh-language fiction, which is a playful take on the literary mystery, allying Y Llyfrgell closer to international works such as Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind or Ann Patchett's political siege novel Bel Canto than anything previously published in Welsh.
Y Llyfrgell was inspired by Fflur's many visits to the National Library of Wales as a PhD student, back in 2004. She said,
“I was there every day for three months, and found myself dreaming up all sorts of dramatic scenarios! As one of our most important national institutions, the Library holds all our secrets and history, but because of its decorum and its silence, this is the last place one would expect any kind of uprising. That tension interests me as a writer.”
Alcemi editor Gwen Davies read the novel in a tent in France and loved the combination of high-pace thriller, dry satirical voice, gorgeous unifying imagery and serious themes about the dangers of political interference in the arts, digitisation, collective and personal memory and sibling rivalry. She wrote in review of the novel,
"Some critics in Wales may be tempted to read Y Llyfrgell, with its vision of a state driven by women who institutionally sideline men and male writers, as a critique of feminism. But considering that the novel's subject, the National Library of Wales, has only just appointed in Avril Jones the first woman in its history to its senior management team, our country has some way to go before becoming a Policewoman State. This is not to criticise Fflur's vision, but rather to appreciate the extent of her allegory of our persisting old-fashioned public life. In a further topical twist that delightfully mirrors the novel's satire on selection, collection and access to heritage, Ms Jones' new remit will be for exactly these areas within the Library. As an aside, Elena, the novelist mother of the 'terrorist' twin librarians who take their workplace hostage, is an interesting doppelganger to Viv in Twenty Thousand Saints, demonstrating Fflur's continuing interest in the legacy of mothers with a high cultural and political profile. This novel fully deserves the Daniel Owen prize and would repay adaptation."
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