Hay Festival 2012: Angharad Price interview How does it feel to write a classic novel? This is what Angharad Price has managed with The Life of Rebecca Jones, which was first published in Welsh in 2002, gained a wide following, and is now enchanting readers in an English translation. Price might try to shrug off her book's significance, but this calm, powerful tale of a rural family coping with tragedy and constant flux, has brought Welsh-language fiction to new audiences. "A lot of people were visiting the farm where it's set," says Jones, "and they would stop my uncle getting on with his daily work." Will the new English translation bring even more boots tramping into the valley? That hasn't happened yet - it's not easy to find. The recollections of the narrator, merging fiction and fact, are of childhood games, the pleasures and sadnesses of a growing family, and the rhythm of the seasons. At times it reads like a hymn to tranquillity. The book was never intended as a crowd-pleaser. Its prose is entirely at home with the enclosed landscape of its valley setting and introduces characters whose sense of belonging never leaves them. "I conceived it as a Welsh-language novel," says Jones. It had to establish itself as a Welsh novel. I decided to give the impression of slightly more formal, biblically inflected Welsh, and to recreate the language of a Sunday School. No wonder Welsh school children are learning passages of it to recite. "That's hard to understand," she says, as is its place among a canon of Welsh novels. She is keen to put this in perspective: "The Welsh novel scene is very healthy at the moment: there are thrillers, science-fiction novels, Marxist novels, feminist novels, and my novel is a very small piece of that." Her view of the literary scene is that of an expert: Price is senior lecturer in Welsh at Bangor University, and Welsh critics have noted the book's literary style gives the narrative voice something that is knowing and learned. It's the semi-fictional narrator that makes the book so distinctive. Price explains the accident that brought it into being: "I wrote it for the prose competition for the National Eisteddfod, and the subject that year was autobiography. I remember a big sepia picture of the narrator that used to hang on the wall when I was a child. The creation of the narrative goes back to that time. One could almost suggest she has brought some immortality to the valley she describes, as well as to the narrator through whom she portrays it. I don't risk running this by her; I think I can gauge the modesty of her response by now. But she does have a hope for the future of the farm, and the valley. After all, her family has been working the same soil since 1012 - a grand claim, but sure enough, she says, "We should take that with a pinch of salt. There's definitely a sense of continuity, but 1012 is the date at the beginning of the records in the family Bible. And it's lucky for marketing; it would have been harder to say that we were marking 997 years of farming here. Angharad Price will be at the Hay Festival on Monday 4th June at 5.30pm. To buy The Life of Rebecca Jones (MacLehose, £10) at a discounted price, go to books.telegraph.co.uk