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Entra in un mondo di storie

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Gwyneth Tyson Roberts

Jane Williams (Ysgafell) was a writer with a long and varied list of publications: poetry, fiction, a riposte to the 1847 Blue Books, the ‘autobiography’ of Betsi Cadwaladr, a history of Wales, a biography of the historian and patriot Carnhuanawc, and a history of women’s writing in English. In her writing and her life she crossed and re-crossed boundaries – national, social, literary, linguistic and cultural – and carved out her own path. As a nineteenth-century woman whose writing career spanned fifty years and many genres, including serious non-fiction and texts in English on Wales and matters Welsh, Jane Williams is unique. This is the first full-length study of her life and work, comprising detailed original research from which the author has drawn a picture of a remarkable and impressive woman writer.

University of Wales Press

Writers of Wales

Jane Williams (Ysgafell)

Michael John Franklin

This is the first biography to foreground the importance of Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Welsh heritage throughout her long life. Born in an obscure Caernarvonshire plwyf, the salonnière of Streatham was finally laid to rest in Tremeirchion church in the Vale of Clwyd. It has been observed how infrequently eighteenth-century Welsh writers long resident in England continued to identify strongly with their homeland, but Hester was mortified at the failure of her brewer husband Henry Thrale, and of her mentor Dr Samuel Johnson, to appreciate the beauties of Wales. Her second husband, however, musician Gabriel Piozzi, was so enamoured that he proposed residing there. A newly-found confidence inspired Hester to write in middle-age, and her daringly personal biography (1786) and edition of Johnson’s letters (1788) were runaway bestsellers. Her travel book (1789), recounting her love affair with her husband’s homeland in Italy, whose landscape reminded her so much of Wales, engaged the reader for the first time as an intimate acquaintance.

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi

M. Wynn Thomas

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. During the course of a career spanning half a century, and dating back to the 1950s when he collaborated with the likes of Graham Greene, Patrick Heron, Saunders Lewis, Richard Burton, Siân Phillips and Peter O’Toole, Humphreys has published some two dozen works of fiction (including Outside the House of Baal, the greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature) as well as highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. In addition to offering a critical and interpretative survey of this remarkable, distinguished body of work, the present volume also sets Humphreys’s output in the context of the dramatic, transformative decades in recent Welsh history during which it was produced.

Emyr Humphreys

John S. Ellis

Around the turn of the century, Welsh readers thrilled to the heroic stories of Owen Rhoscomyl. Having been a cowboy, frontiersman, soldier and mercenary, Rhoscomyl was as adventurous and exotic as his stories. Roving the wilds of the American West, Patagonia and South Africa before finally settling in Wales, Rhoscomyl was a flawed hero who led a rough life that exacted a personal price in poverty, delinquency and violence. He identified deeply with the Welsh nation as a source of tradition, legitimacy and belonging within a wider imperial world. As a popular commercial writer of historical romance, imperial adventure, popular history and public spectacle, he rejected accusations of national inferiority, effeminacy and defeatism in his depictions of the Welsh as an inherently masculine and martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. This literary biography will explore the vaulting ambitions, real achievements, and bitter disappointments of the life, work and milieu of Owen Rhoscomyl.

Owen Rhoscomyl

Walford Davies

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'.

Dylan Thomas

Roger Owen

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.

Gwenlyn Parry

Phil Carradice

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.

Herbert Williams

Tony Brown

In R.S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

Writers of Wales - La serie di libri

Writers of Wales - La serie di libri

Writers of Wales libri in ordine cronologico

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