Derec Llwyd Morgan – författare

A facsimilie copy of his most influential work by Morgan Llwyd (1619-1659), being a powerful and multi-layered allegory in the form of a conversation between three birds - an eagle, a raven and a dove - which represent the State, the Established Church and the Puritans. First published in 1653, the facsimilie is taken from the Guild of Graduates's edition of the work.

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.

When the Welsh writer Kate Roberts died in 1985 at the age of 94, the Times obituary noted that 'she was felt by many to rank with Maupassant as one of the leading European short story writers'. Roberts is widely acknowledged as the major twentieth-century novelist and short story writer to have written in the Welsh language, being known and revered in Wales as 'the Queen of our Literature'. Much of her work has been translated into English and other languages and yet she remains today relatively little known and under-appreciated in comparison, for example, with other female contemporaries who wrote in English, such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen. This volume seeks to redress the balance, bringing the life and work of this extraordinary novelist, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and ardent political campaigner to the attention of the wider world audience that the sheer quality of her writing deserves.

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.

The publication of Cronica Walliae in 2002 provided for the first time ever a printed text of a scholarly work found in manuscripts of the sixteenth century. Its author, the antiquary Humphrey Llwyd, born in Denbigh about 1527, graduated at Oxford University and entered the service of the earl of Arundel. He twice served as a Member of Parliament and, as member for Denbigh in 1569, is accredited with facilitating the passage of the bill for translating the Bible and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh. He died in Denbigh in 1568, and his monument stands in the parish church of Llanfachrell.Cronica Walliae is Humphrey Llwyd’s most substantial work and is based upon the medieval Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogyon, a narrative of the kings and princes of Wales from the death of Cadwaladr Fendigaid to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. It was used by David Powel in his preparation of his Historie of Cambria (1584), and its study today makes possible a better appreciation of the contribution of two scholars who, between them, laid the foundations for modern Welsh historical writing on the medieval period. No manuscript survived in Llwyd’s own handwriting, and the present edition is based upon NLW Llanstephan 177, with variant readings from BL Cotton Caligula Avi.