Honno: The Welsh Women’s Press and the Cultural Ecology of the Welsh Publishing Industry, c. 1950s to the Present

Abstract

Honno: the Welsh Women’s Press is the longest running independent publisher of books by women currently operating in the UK. This article situates Honno’s publishing activities within the ‘cultural ecology’ of the Welsh publishing industry. This unique cultural and economic infrastructure is traced back to the 1950s, when grassroots organizations such as the Books Council of Wales and state-subsidized initiatives were established to support the commercial and literary development of Welsh language publishing, and the survival of the Welsh language more broadly. In the late 1960s further support for the Welsh Book Trade came when the Welsh Arts Council was created, which facilitated the cultural development of Welsh writing in English and Welsh. Contextualizing Honno within the Welsh Publishing Industry reveals how the company has managed to survive as a small publisher focused on its original publishing mission: to promote writing by women in Wales, in English and Welsh, grounded in the history and lives of Welsh women. Honno’s history—and, more broadly, the evolution of the Welsh Publishing Industry in the post-war era—can also help disrupt totalizing narratives about the reach of capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It demonstrates that alternative conceptions of cultural and economic value continue to circulate, despite their apparent embeddedness within neoliberal, business and financialised orthodoxies.