While any good writing will transcend national borders it is still in literature, and perhaps most of all in the novel, that national identity and character are often best reflected. Yet, looking back across the border from England in the mid-1990s, I couldn't see the innate Welshness I felt within me represented anywhere in a body of fiction. Neither could I find the Wales I associated with my grandparents. And where was the Wales of the boys with whom I'd played rugby in Blaina and Pontypool? The Wales of the Black Mountain hill farmers, of the teachers, the artists, the businessmen? Where was the Wales of the industrial valleys? Where was the Wales I knew at all?  In poetry I felt better represented: not only the two Thomases, RS and Dylan, but Gillian Clarke, Dannie Abse, Mike Jenkins, Lynette Roberts, Stephen Knight. The same could not be said in fiction where, for me, apart from the odd lone voice, there appeared to be - like that recent EU map of Britain which ended at Bath and Bristol - a hole where Wales should have been.  The revival of English-language Welsh fiction at the start this century, which produced novelists such as Niall Griffiths, John Williams, Des Barry and Rachel Tresize, means this wouldn't be the case if you were looking now. But any earlier than the late 1990s and that hole is still there. Now the Library of Wales has been launched to revive and reintroduce a series of 20th-century English language classics from Wales that have been allowed to slip out of print over the years. A complete set of the series, including poetry, essays, non-fiction and drama as well as fiction, will be placed in every school and public library in Wales in an attempt to restock what the series editor Professor Dai Smith describes as, "a national memory bank that just wasn't as available as you would expect it to be".  The concept of a national "library" raises some interesting questions. To what extent can a canon be prescribed after the event? What exactly do these "forgotten" books tell us about 20th-century Wales? And perhaps most importantly, why were these texts allowed to slip off the radar in the first place? Was it simply because, as the poet and Poetry Wales editor Robert Minhinnick has suggested, "they were poor or of too limited interest?"  I'd argue that none of the novels so far released under the Library's banner (Border Country by Raymond Williams, So Long, Hector Bebb by Ron Berry, The Dark Philosophers by Gwyn Jones and Country Dance by Margiad Evans) retreated into the background because of a lack of quality. And I suspect Minhinnick, who considers it "a crime that Ron Berry never saw a volume of his short stories in his own lifetime", would partly agree. If this is the case then Wales would indeed seem to have done some of her best writers of the 20th century a serious disservice, especially when we look across the water to Ireland for comparison.  From Joyce's Ulysses and Beckett's Murphy and Molloy through Pat McCabe, John McGahern to the recent Booker nominees Colm Tóibín and John Banville, 20th-century contemporary "English" literature has been fortified and reinvigorated by regular injections of Irish stories and styles. So why not Wales? Perhaps the nature of Ireland's literary kickstart into the 20th century is one clue. Both Joyce and Beckett wrote their seminal works in France. Ireland became a nation of emigrants while Wales became a nation of immigrants. The Irish presence in America assured the US academic support for Ireland's participation in the modernist movement. "Exile," as the Welsh novelist Emyr Humphreys once said, was "the rock on which the modernist was able to perform and experiment". In contrast, Welsh writing came very much from within Wales, from working-class writers educated in the miner's institutes and adult education centres of the valleys as opposed to the Left Bank in Paris.  The Irish experience has always been easier for an English audience to relate to, partly perhaps due to the shared violence of the political upheaval between the two countries. Ever since the act of union in 1543 the struggle between England and Wales, essentially a struggle between the working and ruling classes, has been quieter in nature, the exploitation more subtle and, from an English perspective, the parameters harder to get a hold of and therefore easily looked over. "The tragedy of the Welsh", George Borrows wrote in his 1854 travel book Wild Wales "is that they will never forget they were conquered by the English but the English have already forgotten."  This isn't to say that London-based publishers ignored a flourish in Welsh writing. In the 1930s and 1940s many Welsh writers such as Gwyn Thomas and Margiad Evans were taken on and fared well in the marketplace. But when that interest slipped away after the war there was no home-grown English-language publishing industry in Wales to fill the void. The University of Wales Press stuck rigidly to its academic course and it would be another 40 years until the birth of Seren, the first English-language publisher in Wales. Welsh language writing, although no longer the language of education, fared better, bolstered by the loyal support of the Welsh-speaking community. For a Welsh writer in English though, you were dependent upon the cultural tourism of a London publishing industry that was fast seeing Wales as synonymous with Dylan Thomas. The inferiority complex bred by this situation meant that English-language Welsh authors were also likely to come under attack at home in Wales from critics who only judged Welsh critical success by what was published and praised in London. By the time Wales did have a handful of home-grown English-language publishers like Seren and Gomer in the mid-1980s, it was contemporary writers these publishers were looking towards and the novelists of the post-war period were largely overlooked.  Unlike Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Scotland it has only been relatively recently that Wales has been able to view herself as an autonomous entity. It's no coincidence, I think, that the early stirrings of interest in Welsh English-language classics begun by Honno, the Welsh women's press, coincided with the end of Conservative rule in 1997. According to the young Welsh poet Kathryn Gray, "Autonomy has everything to do with how a society approaches its literature and its past. From autonomy comes not only a strengthened sense of identity and pride but also a gradual movement towards a critical unearthing and reappraisal."  The writers in the Library's initial selection were all aware of this delicate relationship between Welsh lives and English governance and this awareness informs the strong political vein running through the novels. This is perhaps handled most deftly in Raymond Williams' Border Country and Gwyn Thomas' trio of novellas The Dark Philosophers. In the title novella Thomas (who described his work as "Chekhov with chips") switches neatly into the inclusive first-person-plural voice that would become his trademark, thereby planting his narrator firmly within the "we" of common experience, reflecting the communal living of the South Wales terraces where he both learnt and set his fiction. In all three of these stories Thomas carries his politics lightly yet also gives it an eloquent, arresting voice. "We cursed within our own minds," says the narrator of The Dark Philosophers, "the sterile cold and loneliness we had lived in for many years when misery and anger killed the music within us, and we thought sorrowfully of all those many voters lying around about us in the Terraces who had been made numb and stupid by poverty, dead even to the divine beauty created by man."  Raymond Williams' Border Country, as the title suggests, is replete with borders, physical and metaphysical. In this story of a young man's return to his sick father at home near Abergavenny, politics comes in the form of the railworker's support for the miners in the General Strike of 1926 and in the carefully calibrated portrait of a father and son facing each other from across the divide of the son's education, which has drawn him away from his working-class home. This novel (which Williams rewrote seven times in a conscious attempt not to write in "a Welsh style") was, for me, the most personal of discoveries. I started reading it when I returned to my family home in Abergavenny over Christmas and although the social parameters had undoubtedly changed since the 1950s, emotionally it still rang true. I saw my own relationship with the Black Mountains landscape and my friends from schooldays echoed again and again in Matthew's story. In the story of his parents, Harry and Ellen Price, meanwhile I finally found those qualities of Welshness that I'd associated with my grandparents. But although I went to the same school as Williams and the landscape of his novel was the landscape of my childhood, it was Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill, not Border Country, that we studied at school.  First published in 1970, So Long, Hector Bebb tells the brief rise and fall of a gifted valleys boxer who, having got on the wrong side of circumstance and his own impulsive rage, makes a retreat into the hills. Told from 14 different first-person perspectives, no plot summary is ever going to do justice to what Berry achieves in this terrifying, funny book. As Niall Griffiths observes in the forward, "See the fun language has when twisted into such shapes? See how it loves to be mauled in a miner's hands, a boxer's hands, how it loves to be allowed to run riot?"  "We came out on Coldra Crescent, one of those warm air nights, stars spitting in the sky like firebugs stuck on a big black velvet rump. A summer night to make anybody with standard glands feel that tidy homes, spring mattresses, four guaranteed meals per day and legalised religion were all criminal to human development."  Fans of Griffiths's writing will find it fascinating to trace his stylistic lineage back through the work of Ron Berry. But Griffiths was lucky; he just happened to pick up a copy of Hector Bebb when he was 10 years old. "There were," he says, "forces at work." With the launch of the Library of Wales, hopefully literary inheritance won't be left entirely to the work of such forces. At some point the library will have to make a clear decision as to its role in the cultural life of the nation - reviver of lost texts or the definitive collection of 20th-century Welsh writing in English? Either way it'll be worth it, as David Jones said of his writing of The Anathemata, to "try and make a shape out of the very things of which one is oneself made". Because until that shape is there, distilled and translated into fiction, our existence as a nation will be muted.  · Owen Sheers' The Dust Diaries (Faber, £7.99) was winner of the Welsh Book of the Year 2005. His most recent poetry collection is Skirrid Hill (Seren, £7.99).
In neglecting its literary heritage, Wales has done a disservice to some of the best writers of the 20th century. A new national library aims to put this right.