Monday 27th February – Saturday 4th March
To open Welsh Art Week London 2017, Professor Dai Smith CBE will talk about his new work of fiction What I Know I Cannot Say/ All That Lies Beneath Monday 27 Feb, 6–8pm
Dai Smith is one of the leading Welsh writers of his generation with a national and international profile. His work encompasses ground-breaking history (Wales, Wales), biography (Raymond Williams A Warrior’s Tale) and fiction Dream On. He has also found time to write accounts of the those intrinsically Welsh institutions in The Fed the biography of the NUM (with Hywel Francis) and Fields of Praise, a biography of The Welsh Rugby Union. In addition he has been head of programmes for BBC in Wales and Chaired the Arts Council of Wales for eight years and is the series editor of the Library of Wales series. He was awarded a CBE in the 2017 New Year’s Honour List for services to the Arts in Wales. He is also Parthian’s Author of the Month for March 2017.
On Friday 3 March we’ll have the London launch of Hilly Janes’ photo book of Dylan Thomas’ 1950s Swansea Ugly, Lovely. Hilly will be in conversation with arts journalist Jasper Rees.
Hilly Janes found a stunning 1950s photo album made by her aunt Ethel Ross depicting the places that Dylan Thomas wove into his work in Swansea and Carmarthenshire, which is published alongside the first UK edition of the Dylan Thomas playlet Lunch at Mussolini’s.
Ethel Ross’s niece, the journalist and biographer Hilly Janes, author of The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, continues her exploration of the poet and his life in her new book, Ugly, Lovely: Dylan Thomas’s Swansea and Carmarthenshire of the 1950s in pictures. Her work has been praised as “an engaging, accessible biography” (Natasha Tripney, The Observer).
Personal and unpretentious, it altered the myth of Dylan Thomas by presenting the man through the eyes of his creative Swansea friends, and particularly Hilly’s father, the artist Alfred Janes.
Cerys Matthews has written the foreword, and John Goodby, editor of the The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas and Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University, has contributed an essay about the literary significance of the places in Thomas’s work.
This engaging book, which brings together Dylan Thomas’s haunts and writing, also includes a satirical sketch previously unpublished in the UK, written by Dylan Thomas as a commentary on fascism.
Listen to Hilly Janes discuss the book on the BBC World Service
All of the events will be held at the Woolff Gallery 89 Charlotte Street W1. The show will be open all week from Monday 27 Feb 10am – 6pm every day except Saturday which will be 10am – 3pm.
