On Being a Writer in Wales: Carys Shannon

Carys Shannon

“Where were you going when I saw you coming back?”  is one of the phrases I heard when growing up in Wales.

I’ve begun to argue that it is one of the best philosophical questions that exists. It holds time inside it: departure, journey, and return all at once. It’s the question of every exile, every artist, every person who has ever left one version of themselves only to find another.

I didn’t become aware of my Welshness, or how that is expressed in my writing, until I left Wales. Only when I was more than a thousand miles away, living in Andalucía and teaching English, did I start to understand all the ways in which it expressed itself.

Drenched at 40 Degrees

In Andalucía, it was hot and dry: forty degrees most days in the summer. I had been writing Truth Like Water for a while by then, but it was there, in that parched place, that the novel began to come alive. What I missed most was rain.

I would stand outside when a cloud appeared, watching it like a miracle. I wrote about water constantly, the tide-soaked marsh, morning fog, the suck and squelch of the sands – right down to the slimy estuary mud. On the rare days rain came, I’d walk through it, letting it soak my hair, my clothes, my bones – the strange energy of it, a kind of elation, always sending me straight back to my notebooks.

The students in my English Language class would ask me what I missed about Wales, and I would say: my friends and the sound of rain on the roof as you wake up. Friends at home would howl with laughter at this and tell me to come back for a week in darkest December and see how I liked it then.

I was an outsider in both places, always longing for something. So, I turned to the only place that has ever made sense to me: the page.

Leaning into Voice

Writing Truth Like Water became a kind of homecoming. The estuary in the novel – the tides, ponies and marsh all make up a fictional version of the place I grew up in north Gower.

Revisiting it became almost addictive. Hard to put down. Somewhere between strange nostalgia and the purging of memories.

I had to be very careful when re-writing the novel. At times, it was difficult to know where my memories ended, and my character’s life began.

Catrin, the protagonist, isn’t me and I needed to be sure I was writing from her point of view, using her words and metaphors, staying true to her lived experience. It took a few drafts to get there. The voice that came out was feral Gower, marshland, mud, tide: my Wales, filtered through her character.

Truth Like Water then was both an exorcism of and a love letter to the place I grew up. It carries the same contradictions towards it that I do: affection and frustration; repulsion and love; the safety and suffocation that small communities bring.

Homecoming

The book is also an offering, a sliver of one kind of Welshness that is unique to that tiny place. A version I never read or heard when I was growing up, when there was no one like me on any of the pages I was reading.

I’m back in Swansea now, the book is out and I’m meeting readers in libraries and bookshops across Wales. The book has a big emotional heart, I’m told. It sounds like us, someone else said. It showed me a community I never knew about…a comment on-line.

If there was ever a full circle moment as a writer, this is it.

“Where were you going when I saw you coming back?”

“Home.”

Carys Shannon is originally from north Gower, Swansea, and now divides her time between Wales and the Spanish Pyrenees. She has had short stories published by Honno Press, Parthian Books and Mslexia Magazine, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her debut novel, Truth Like Water, was published by Parthian Books in October, 2025. When not writing, Carys is happiest enjoying slow time in big nature.