Dylan Thomas & his wife Caitlin

I have been writing about the Thomases since 1977, when a publisher suggested I do a life of Dylan. I agreed, without much enthusiasm. There had been a good one already, a dozen years earlier, by a writer, Constantine FitzGibbon, who was himself reluctant to take on the job. It wasn’t yet apparent that Thomas’s work (especially Under Milk Wood) and his life would become such a feature of the literary scene.

The biography I wrote has been revised more than once, and is now on the list of the Welsh publisher, Y Lolfa. I have also edited Thomas’s Letters, which make a vast expensive volume more consulted in libraries than by private purchasers.

The idea here is to show Dylan Thomas as he was before he passed into legend, and to report, from time to time, on books, articles, films and events that make up the ‘Dylan industry.’ But it isn’t a ‘literary’ site; I am a biographer, not a critic.

To be going on with, here’s an extract from the Introduction to the current edition of my biography.