Authorgraph No 267: Manon Steffan Ros
Manon Steffan Ros interviewed by Clive Barnes
The Yoto Carnegie Medal, awarded to Manon last year for The Blue Book of Nebo, doesn’t come up until quite late in our conversation, but it’s an award that means a great deal to her. ‘It was a year ago yesterday,’ she tells me, as if the date is etched in her 
memory. ‘It was such an honour. It changed my life.’ It hasn’t changed who she is, or where she is, or what she spends her life doing, of course. She is still writing in Wales between the mountains and the sea, and her writing has brought her many Welsh language awards. But the Carnegie was a new level of recognition. ‘If you would have asked me ten years ago, what I would have wanted for my career, it would have been that.’ It was also a vindication of her dedication to writing for children, ‘I’m lucky, I have been working as an author for eighteen years now, but people are a lot more interested in what I’m doing, particularly in my writing for children and young adults, and that’s really what I want to do and that’s what people want from me at the moment.
The Blue Book of Nebo, like all of Manon’s books, was written first in Welsh, and takes place in Wales, even the nuclear reactor, whose breakdown triggers its story of survival against the odds, is in Anglesey. Her parents were Welsh language enthusiasts and activists, although her father was born in England and learnt the language in his twenties. And, at home, Welsh was the language of her childhood.
She learnt English ‘by osmosis…It’s everywhere.’ And now she is ‘equally comfortable in both languages, and I’ve never had to learn either of them…Fair play to my parents.’ She talks about the privilege and encouragement of being part of the Welsh language community. ‘There are so many creative opportunities. It’s a cultural thing. You rarely meet someone who speaks Welsh or who has been through the Welsh education system who isn’t writing creatively or isn’t in a band.’ She talks about the Urdd (Urdd Gobaith Cymru), the Welsh language youth movement which has its own Eisteddfod. ‘You get the opportunity to do these things to test yourself, to explore, to find what you’re good at.’ There is a lively, exciting literary scene in Welsh that doesn’t necessarily follow Anglo-American trends and, on the other hand, because there aren’t that many books, you are encouraged to read across genres. ‘It creates something unique. You can’t stay in a box. You have to explore it all.’ Above all, she reflects, ‘I think in Welsh. I speak to all my family in Welsh. It’s the language of all those special relationships.’
Manon has written for adults. Her novel Blasu, which she translated into English as The Seasoning, is a moving book about family life in a North Wales village and the buried secret at its heart. But her first books were for children and these had their origin in grief in her own family. Her mother died young, and then when Manon was pregnant with her first child, she didn’t want her mother to be known to her own children just as a two-dimensional ‘still, silent’ figure in a photo-frame, so, in a remarkable act of fictional resurrection, she wrote two fantasy books about how she imagined her mother might have been as a fourteen-year-old, ‘feisty, funny, cool and clever.’ She credits her mother with her love of story, ‘I’ve always been an average reader, but Mam would always read to me, even after I could read independently.’ I remind Manon of an inspiring talk she did for The Reading Agency a couple of years ago called Books are My Best Mates (available on YouTube), ‘Yes, always, always,’ she emphasises, ‘Always company for you. There’s something about understanding another person on a deeper level, when you’re reading their story. These black marks on white paper somehow allow me to transfer these images in my head into your head. That’s amazing. It’s a sort of magic that we’ve grown used to and that we don’t see as miraculous anymore.’ Although she enjoys writing for adults, she finds writing for children and young people more rewarding. ‘I feel more self-conscious writing for adults.’ She finds children wholehearted and open in their responses. ‘I trust children to get it. We are our most true selves in our teens. Everything you believe you believe wholeheartedly. There’s an energy there.’
Manon has said that she tends to use her writing as a form of therapy. ‘If there’s something I find difficult or I can’t understand, or I can’t empathise with, I try to write through it.’ The Blue Book of Nebo, of course, deals with an apocalyptically difficult situation, a nuclear disaster, but it’s also about a boy, his mother and his sister, learning to live together in a new intimacy. At the moment we join them, Dylan has known no other life, while Rowenna, his mother, has a past he knows nothing about. We explore their individual responses to this new situation and their developing relationship through their separate entries in an exercise book with blue covers. This is the blue book of the title, a Welsh classic for the nuclear age to match the red and the black of medieval Wales.
Sam, the younger narrator of Manon’s latest novel, Me and Aaron Ramsay, has his own difficulties. They are more prosaic than Dylan’s 
perhaps, but enough to keep him awake at night with insistent anxieties which he christens “The Bad.” His parents are arguing, his dad is injured in a car accident that ends a promising local football career, and there is a deep-seated problem that the family have yet to confront, his dad’s illiteracy. This is the story of how Sam copes with all these pressures, partly through his love of football, and his emulation of his hero Aaron Ramsey, partly through friendship and support from outside the family, and mostly through his own good sense. It’s a reassuring book, and it helps that it is written in the past tense. These are problems that Sam has survived and he can look back on them. When we talk about the book, Manon says, ‘I do tend to write from the perspective of teenage boys, perhaps because I have two of them now. Also, it’s a little bit of my own experience as a teenager. Adults think you don’t know what’s going on, but you really do. Children are really brilliant, sometimes better than adults, at reading a room. I don’t think we give them enough credit. Sam is kind, but I do think that is partly connected to the dysfunction of his family. When someone grows up in that kind of tension, they tend to want to make everything ok.’
Manon has been the translator of all her books that have been published in English: a process she also characterises as adaptation, since there have been elements in the stories that made sense in a purely Welsh context but perhaps needed altering for an English audience. It’s a process she finds fascinating, particularly as in her early translation of Blasu, translating word for word, she found that the original book in Welsh seemed much darker than the English version. Following her Carnegie success, she has been excited to see all the international translations of The Blue Book of Nebo, and gratified that she had been able to point to the richness of the Welsh language culture through the book, not only in her references there to the Black Book of Carmarthen and Red Book of Hergest, but to Dylan’s discovery of the poet and essayist T.H. Parry Williams, ‘it’s mind-blowing that there are now people across the world who might know of our greatest writer in Welsh through my work.’
Even before the success of The Blue Book, Manon began work adapting some of her other novels for children and young people into English. Two books to look out for in the autumn are Greta, a young adult novel, adapted from Manon’s adult novel Llechi; and for children, Feather, adapted from Pluen. And, with the Carnegie a year behind her, eventually there will be something new. ‘I am taking my time with doing the next thing. I think I’ve known for a few years what I have to write next. I vaguely know what it’s about and the characters, and now, a year later, I’m looking forward again to the thrill of writing and not knowing exactly where the story’s going.’ And we, too, can look forward to discovering a new story from this greatly gifted writer, in Welsh and/or in English.
Clive Barnes was Principal Children’s Librarian, Southampton City and is now a freelance researcher.
Books mentioned, all by Manon Steffan Ros:
The Blue Book of Nebo, Firefly Press, 978-1913102784, £8.99 pbk
Me and Aaron Ramsey, Firefly Press, 978-1915444493, £7.99 pbk
The Seasoning, Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 978-1909983250, £8.99 pbk
