'You can't just be complacent and say the writers are not there'

It's never been more important to ensure that silenced or less-heard voices are platformed in the arts. A groundbreaking YA novel, The Five, points the way forward, writes Jenny White

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TOKENISM and the appropriation of other people's voices are issues that have dogged everything from literature to filmmaking.

In times of increasing imbalance, exploitation and marginalisation, it’s never been more important that those sometimes described as “the voiceless” take their rightful place on air, on the screen and on the printed page.

In reality, “the voiceless” have always had voices: the question is how best to ensure the path to a platform is clear for all, so that these voices are actually heard, rather than stolen or ignored.

This is an imperative that theatre-maker Elgan Rhys chose to engage with during the Covid pandemic, when the first iteration of The Five was birthed as Y Pump, a series of novellas commissioned and published in Welsh by Y Lolfa.

Edited by Rhys but handing the mic to young writers with lived experience of its key themes, Y Pump and the new English-language version The Five address - among other things - anxiety, self-harm, sexual abuse, Islamophobia, cancer and assault, through the interconnected tales of five teenage loners.

These are presented as five novellas, written collaboratively by early-career authors with teenage coauthors who were selected as a result of a rigorous nationwide open callout. The novellas are: Tim, by Tomos Jones and Elgan Rhys; Tami, by Ceri-Anne Gatehouse and Mared Roberts; Aniq, by Mahum Umer and Marged Elen Wiliam; and Robyn, by Leo Drayton and Iestyn Tyne.

"Y Pump was a passion project during Covid," says Rhys. "It came from that intensified urgency that we all felt to enact allyship towards less heard and less represented voices."

Drawing on processes of co-creation and youth-led storytelling that Rhys had seen in the theatre, the project set out to achieve this by pairing authentic emerging voices with writers who already had the privilege of experience and networks.