Books in the Writers of Wales series

Gwenlyn Parry was one of the most important Welsh-language playwrights of the twentieth century and played a key role in the popularisation and flourishing of drama in the theatre and on television during the 1970s and 1980s. Parry's major stage plays - Saer Doliau, Ty ar y Tywod, Y Ffin and Y Twr - had a substantial impact, and were instrumental in solidifying a new relationship between drama and theatrical production in Welsh, bringing the theatricality of the Absurd to a popular audience for the first time. His plays have been the subject of much critical attention in Welsh, and have been reinterpreted in production on many occasions, both in their original form and in translation. This study is the first extended treatment of his life and work in English, and examines the complex and occasionally paradoxical relationship between the autobiographical aspects of his writing and his use of theatrical form.

This introduction to the life and work of Bert Coombes should be valuable not just for its assessment of Coombes, but for the light that it sheds on the social and industrial context in which he lived. His writing articulated the social and economic injustice of contemporary capitalism.

An introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest Welsh dramatists of this century. John Gwilym Jones (1904-1988) was also a short-story writer, novelist and literary critic whose work was almost exclusively in the Welsh language.

William Salesbury is a seminal figure in the literary history of Wales. This text provides an introduction to the life and work of Salesbury (c.1520-1584), a scholar and translator of the New Testament into Welsh.

A study of the strange life and pathetic death of T.J. Llewelyn Prichard, the author of "Twm Sion Catti", the first Welsh novel in English which was popular enough to have been pirated in the mid-19th century.

This work examines the career and work of the 20th-century Welsh author Islwyn Ffowc Elis. His works were said to have laid the foundations for the contemporary Welsh novel.

This text looks at the Ben Bowen phenomenon as a product both of his view of himself as a great poet and a Wales that fed that assumption. It traces his escape from a miner's life in the Rhondda, his stay in South Africa, his talent for controversy and his growing awareness of his early death.

Herbert Williams is one of Wales' most celebrated and distinguished writers. A man of many talents, he is a poet, novelist, short story writer and historian. This book provides a critical survey of his life and writing. It is a combination of biography and critical appraisal and the chapters dovetail together to provide a continuous narrative combined with an appreciation of the man's work. It includes the following areas or elements: Biographical information, taking Herbert from his beginnings in Aberystwyth to the present day. It follows the man from his school days to early work as a journalist, from his time as a Producer at the BBC to his achievements as a poet and prose writer.It looks at the significant influences on his life - and, therefore, on his writing. These include his early days in a working-class house dominated by books with a father who actively encouraged him to read. These influences also include the writers who inspired him and his early attempts at finding his own voice, as well as Herbert's time in Bronllys Hospital, as a fifteen year old TB patient and the death of a younger brother from TB were pivotal moments in his life. They have influenced, in one way or another, almost everything he has written or spoken about since those traumatic days.The book examines in some detail the effect of these experiences on his development as a writer and as a man. It presents an analysis of the many elements of Herbert's creative life. He has always been an eclectic writer, turning his hand to biography and short stories as easily as he does to poetry. What inspires and drives Herbert Williams to keep writing and publishing, in such a wide sphere. What makes him want to communicate his ideas and emotions, often very painful ones at that?

Published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2019, this is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of the life and work (excluding only work for television) of the major Welsh writer Emyr Humphreys.

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.

Rhys Davies was a seminal influence in Welsh writing because he was one of the first novelists to depict industrial Wales, and was a highly prolific writer producing some twenty novels and one hundred short stories in a career that spanned six decades. This book addresses Davies' struggle to enter the privileged circles of literary production.

At his death in 2000, R. S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world, having been nominated for the Nobel prize for Literature. With Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas is probably Wales's best-known poet internationally.Tony Brown provides an introduction to R. S. Thomas's life and work, as well as new perspectives and insights for those already familiar with the poetry. His approach is broadly chronological, interweaving life and work in order to evaluate Thomas's poetic achievement. In addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas's poetry, and its movements over time between personal, spiritual and political concerns, Tony Brown also examines Thomas's contribution to the culture of Wales, not just in his writing but also his political interventions and activism on behalf of Welsh language and culture.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century cleric, was the first person to compose a detailed and continuous history of Britain from its origins to the domination of the Anglo-Saxons. This book illustrates the close ties between Geoffrey's notion of British and Arthurian society and other materials from medieval Wales and Ireland.