The Library of Wales series of English-language classics from Wales is funded by the Welsh Assembly Government through the Welsh Books Council and published by Parthian Books.
The appointed series Editor, whose remit includes the choice of books, prioritisation, commissioning, design and final production, is Professor Dai Smith, from CREW, who holds The Raymond Williams Chair in the Cultural History of Wales
Dai Smith, Series Editor, on the Library of Wales Series:
The Library of Wales is a Welsh Assembly Government initiative designed to ensure that all of the rich and extensive literature of Wales which has been written in English will now be made available to readers in and beyond Wales. Sustaining this wider literary heritage is understood by the Welsh Assembly Government to be a key component in creating and disseminating an ongoing sense of modern Welsh culture and history for the future Wales which is now emerging from contemporary society. Through these texts, until now unavailable or out-of-print or merely forgotten, the Library of Wales will bring back into play the voices and actions of the human experience that has made us, in all our complexity, a Welsh people.
The Library of Wales will include prose as well as poetry, essays as well as fiction, anthologies as well as memoirs, drama as well as journalism. It will complement the names and texts that are already in the public domain and seek to include the best of Welsh writing in English, as well as to showcase what has been unjustly neglected. No boundaries will limit the ambition of the Library of Wales to open up the borders that have denied some of our best writers a presence in a future Wales. The Library of Wales has been created with that Wales in mind: a young country not afraid to remember what it might yet become.
These books--novels, essays, poetry, memoirs, short stories, drama, journalism---are seen by the National Assembly of Wales as essential building blocks in developing the emerging civic culture of the nation. Consequently, sets of the published volumes are being placed in all the secondary schools and libraries of Wales as they appear and their study will be encouraged through the curriculum.
