Half a Century in Orbit
A Joint Editorial
An email exchange between our current editor Emily Trahair and our founding editor Ned Thomas to mark 50 years since the launch of Planet.
‘Time and again, a bit like one of those Google maps, Planet has taken me upwards and outwards from the fulcrum of Wales to the furthest reaches of discussion and discovery.’
Jan Morris, from a speech at our 40th anniversary party.
Despite the scale suggested by the magazine’s masthead, Planet has always been run as a micro-organisation, albeit one that has from the start sought to reach beyond the limitations of Wales’ political status to offer Welsh perspectives on the questions facing humanity at large. Its core purposes can perhaps be distilled down to these three aims: to forge new forms of internationalism from the vantage point of Wales; to bridge and bring into dialogue with one another different cultures and language communities within an often very fractured nation; and to seamlessly juxtapose fields and forms of writing as diverse as politics, culture, literature, the arts, investigative journalism, life writing, reviews, fiction and poetry. Planet has offered unique commentary on a tumultuous half century for Wales, throughout the eras of the Cold War, Welsh-language direct-action protest, the emergence of feminism, the Miners’ Strike, Thatcherism, European integration, the development of devolution, the Iraq War, accelerating climate change, austerity, Brexit, Black Lives Matter and Covid-19, the latter discussed in our new series Breathing Freely: Possibilities for a Post-Pandemic Society.
Emily Trahair
