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Drift: Winner of the Wales Book of the Year

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The perspectives it takes cover not only Nefyn, Hamza, Joseph, Efa and Emrys – but also military personal who shuffle paper, forge records and neglect their wives. It contributes to the novel’s overall surrealism and implies ‘she’ is not important enough to be named.

We meet career lieutenants off to black-tie balls in the senior mess, thickset guards whose tongues are sharp with ambition, Nefyn’s surly brother Joseph, and a kind neighbour, Efa, who is losing her husband to dementia. Arguably, aside from Nefyn, it is the sea that is positioned as the main character in the novel, both in Lewis’s lingering descriptions of it and the role it plays in the story itself. I do love magic realism but here I don’t think it entirely worked because I couldn’t suspend my disbelief even though I wanted to.So I loosely based it around Llangrannog, and the holiday homes are a comment on how difficult it is to sustain a living culture when you have homes that are empty half the year, and the cultural erasure that comes with changing the names of places and properties. There’s a really damaging view of Welsh language-speaking Wales as insular and inward-looking, and of course that’s not true. Overall, it is the setting of the story that takes centre stage in Drift rather than the characters, who seem to happily embrace the influence the sea has over them and their present and past relationships, albeit some more than others. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature and sits on the Welsh curriculum. Moved and moved so that he had become so far removed from where he had been, who he had been, that he no longer knew himself.

There’s quite a claustrophobic feel to the novel in many ways, and as you said, with the cottage almost falling into the sea, it’s a sense of cultures on the edge, pushed up to the edge, and you’ll find Welsh-speaking communities quite often pushed up against the side of the sea. She was raised in Aberaeron before moving at the age of twelve to her family's farm in the parish of Dihewyd. And to be present in conversations, to be visible in conversations I think is important as we develop as a nation. Rich with magic, mystery and the wonder of the sea, fans of The Lamplighters will fall in love with Drift.

In times of war, Lewis finds resilience, redemption and hope; right now, Drift feels perfectly judged. Welsh people are celebrated for our hills and valleys, but we don’t see that much about the coastline somehow, which is strange.

But I will explore how topical Drift is, regarding how UK government policies treat refugees like Hamza, as well as the novel’s occasional strangeness, the selkie myth it evokes, and Nefyn’s relationship with her twin, Joseph. That’s why I tend not to translate my own work, because I’m too close, and I think there is a value in letting somebody bring their own experience to it. The influence and jurisdiction of the ocean are emphasised by the irony created when the sea’s suggested sentient nature is set against the proud and pretentious army base, which tries to assert an authority of control over everything.The romantic relationship which grows between Hamza and Nefyn is quiet but insistent, the eventual fact of its arrival seeming more inevitable than it might in summary. It is a startling, apposite metaphor, a good example of Lewis’s attentive prose style, that also works to summarise the novel’s dramatic tension, the opposition of nature and manmade violence, the great clash that will play out over the course of the narrative. TK Quentin is about to start a MA course in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University.

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