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Start the Week: Welsh identities

Welsh identities

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Welsh identities

Helen Lewis with Richard Wyn Jones, Hanan Issa, Marion Loeffler and Richard King.

Richard Wyn Jones, Hanan Issa, Marion Loeffler and Richard King discuss the historical, cultural and political forces that have shaped Welshness, with Helen Lewis.

In May Wales will hold local elections to elect members of all twenty-two local authorities. Richard Wyn Jones, professor of Welsh politics, examines the issues facing the country. He tells Helen Lewis how nationalism plays an important role in politics in Wales, but that its national identity is a complex mix of Welsh, English and British.  

What does it meant to be Welsh today? And what of the future of Wales? These are the questions posed in a series of essays, Welsh [Plural]. The poet Hanan Issa is one of the co-editors, and is looking to get beyond the stereotype images of castles, coal and choirs, and understand the full rich diversity of Welsh identities.

The historian Dr Marion Loeffler explores how pivotal works of art and literature have helped shape Wales. In a landmark BBC series, Art That Made Us (on BBC2 in April) she looks back to the 7th century poem Y Gododdin and the painter Penry Williams’ depiction of Cyfarthfa Ironworks Interior at Night, 1825. 

Wales’s industrial landscape is at the centre of Richard King’s oral history, Brittle With Relics, which focuses on the huge changes that took place during the second half of the 20th century. The story of the effects of deindustrialisation, loss of employment and social cohesion, as well as the fight for a voice, language and identity, is told through the people who lived through it.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image credit:  BBC ClearStory - Artist and Performer Sean Parry with a byddar drum

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