Abandon All Hope
A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature
‘I awoke from a deep sleep I had taken under the shade of a tree in a field at the outskirts of a dark wood, without remembering how I had gotten there, or, indeed, where it was exactly, I had gotten.’
So begins a most unusual odyssey, in which a writer – who bears a striking similarity to our author, Gary Raymond – allows himself to be led through the many-layered realms of Welsh literature, not by Virgil but by the late Professor Raymond Williams.
Taking in the history of Welsh writing in English from the legacy of the bardic tradition to contemporary experimental works, Abandon All Hope introduces Welsh literature in a way it has never been presented before – as cutting edge, experimental, vibrant, exciting, intimate, and with a multitude of voices. This voyage into a uniquely Welsh Inferno offers a revolutionary new way to examine and explain literary history, traversing elements of chronology and genre, in a wide-ranging and, above all, highly entertaining manifesto for a new perception of Welsh literature both inside and outside of Wales.
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor and broadcaster. He is the presenter of The Review Show for BBC Radio Wales, and is editor and co-founder of Wales Arts Review. He is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, For Those Who Come After (2015), The Golden Orphans (2018), and Angels of Cairo (2021), as well as a non-fiction book, How Love Actually Ruined Christmas. He has edited a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, from short story anthologies to political memoir. As a critic he has been seen in the pages of The Guardian and heard on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row and BBC Radio Three’s Sunday Morning programme.
