Dylan Thomas

Description

Poet and prose-writer, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was born in Swansea to a family from rural Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. He studied at Swansea Grammar School, and subsequently spent fifteen months as a junior reporter on the South Wales Daily Post. His schoolboy verse suddenly matured into original poems between 1930 and 1934. These notebooks remained the major source of his first three published volumes, published in 1934; 1936 and 1939. Thomas moved to London in 1934 and reviewed books for leading periodicals. He spent the rest of his life moving between London and Wales (especially at Laugharne, Llan-gain and New Quay), and later Oxford. During the Second World War, he started writing scripts and taking part in broadcast talks and readings for the BBC and Strand Films. This was followed by further poetry writing and publishing - his Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952) was awarded Foyle's Poetry Prize. A growing reputation in the USA made lecture visits there appear a new and profitable source of income. Four American tours between 1950 and 1953 followed but was dogged by alcoholism and financial irrespnsibility. Thomas died in New York, after a bout of excessive drinking, on 9 November 1953. His body was brought back for burial in the churchyard at Laugharne. A memorial stone in his honour was placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1982. He is undoutedly one of the most well-known, critically acclaimed and best-loved English language poets of the twentieth century. Information taken from Meic Stephens' New Companion to the Literature of Wales (University of Wales Press, 1998)

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