Letter: The Welsh way with words

London has woken-up to the huge depth of current Scottish literary talent ("Scotia Nostra", Review, 19 January) and the Irish, it has long been accepted, are in many cases better writers than the English. Which leaves the Welsh: the oldest indigenous culture in Western Europe, with their inaccessible native language and the ghost of Dylan Thomas.

A trip to Cardiff bookshops will show the visitor a plethora of writers who, throughout the 20th century, have written in English, often with great intrinsic merit, though very rarely to critical acclaim in England. The Welsh also possess, in R S Thomas, a poet who is regarded outside these shores in the same breath as Seamus Heaney. Will London ever wake up to the literary delights of the Taffia?

Tony Lewis-Jones

Bristol