Almanac 15 literally unearths some fascinating new material about the life and work of one of Wales’s greatest twentieth-century poets, R. S. Thomas. Matthew Jarvis asks the simple question: what were those ‘mangels’ being docked by R. S.’s peasant farmer, Iago Prytherch? And he comes up with some fascinating answers....Even more sensational is the new information discovered by Sheila Savill in her painstaking examination of birth and marriage certificates and other public records relating to R. S.’s family. The American scholar, David Paddy, compares R. S with his Irish contemporary, Samuel Beckett, and comes up with new insights into the work of these two gloomy giants of modern literature.

But it is not only canonical writers and works that find a place in Almanac: this issue contains two essays on horror fiction and one on contemporary crime writing. Jessica Webb focuses attention on the sinister ‘weird tales’ of Arthur Machen, while Darryl Jones reveals some bizarre links between Welsh nationalism and the gruesomer end of the horror spectrum. Catherine Phelps offers a detailed and imaginative analysis of Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth-set detective fiction as a form of subversive minstrelsy. The issue is completed by another comparative essay, in which Gwynne Edwards explores Harri Webb’s considerable debt to the Spanish poet, Lorca, and an elegant essay by Elinor Smith which examines the ways in which our foremost living novelist, Emyr Humphreys, represents one of the issues which, sooner or later, concerns us all: old age.

Finally, Laura Wainwright has compiled the annual bibliography of criticism in the field, an indispensable aid to all students and scholars interested in Anglophone Welsh writing today.