Stephen Price
A Welsh author has published a pioneering experimental novel in Welsh that plays with readers’ expectations around the form.
Jerry Hunter’s Y Rhawnbais (‘The Hair-shirt’) is the latest original publication by independent publishing house Melin Bapur, but it neither looks nor reads like a regular novel.
Hunter has form as an experimental novelist: his previous novels have included 2014’s Ebargofiant and this year’s An Atheist Christian Gunslinger, both of which featured a unique orthography for Welsh and English respectively, reflecting possible futures in which language has changed.
Although the written sections of Y Rhawnbais are mostly in a more conventional orthography, the novel itself is anything but conventional.
Taking appearance of a scrapbook or perhaps a folder containing a patient’s notes, the book is arranged from a series of collage-like images in which the printed word jostles for space with hand-drawn images and words and scraps of found materials. The novel’s story unfolds in fragments, which the reader must piece together in order to decipher its plot.
Originally serialised in the magazine O’r Pedwar Gwynt over a period of eight years, the novel is dedicated to the magazine’s editor, Sioned Puw Rowlands. In its new published form, the novel can now at last be read as a single volume.
Melin Bapur’s editor Adam Pearce explains: “Jerry approached me with the idea of publishing Y Rhawnbais as a book, and I was intrigued. I’d been aware of the serial already, but for me it’s easier to digest as a whole work, where you can flip back and forth between sections and read the whole thing.”
“It’s definitely a challenging work, though it can be read in one sitting. We are calling it a novel, though no doubt there are some who won’t recognise it as one: if graphic novels are novels then so is this, but there’s something poetic or even song-like in the way the different sections sometimes repeat and layer on top of each other, and then loop back again. The longer you spend with it the more things start to cohere and fall into place.”
Pearce adds: “Jerry deliberately refuses to ‘explain’ or interpret the novel for the reader, but the book draws on things that will be very familiar to many readers – mental health is a theme, and there are references to things like the Mabinogi as well.
“There was definitely an element of chance or randomness to the composition: there are parts of the novel that existed but were hidden from view when the pieces fell together, and so were lost.”
“I’m absolutely certain there has never been a book like this written in Welsh before, and probably not in any other language either. Independent publishing can fill that niche for works that conventional publishers might not want to take a chance on.”
A launch event for the book will take place in Palas Print, Caernarfon, at 6pm on Friday 27th November 2026 (free entry).
Jerry Hunter’s Y Rhawnbais is available now from www.melinbapur.cymru for £9.73+P&P. Also new from Melin Bapur this month are a selection of R. Silyn Roberts’s poetry, Anobaith Serch a Cherddi Eraill (£9.99), and T. Rowland Hughes’s novel Y Cychwyn (£11.99).
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