Is the best writing about Wales done from afar?

Are writers who have left Wales best positioned to be honest about it?

I’m still mulling over the concept of “a people’s history” and it brought me to conversations of old - specifically, is Wales best written about from afar? I think of Emlyn Williams, Caradoc Evans, and many others. But also lingering in the back of the mind was the comment some critic made in answer to the question of why Oscar-winning movie American Beauty resonated so deeply with an American audience, how did it get suburban isolation so authentically, how did the film, when so many have failed, understand America so purely. “Simple: it took an outsider to look at us.”