Caitlin – the Life of Caitlin Thomas

Dylan Thomas’s wife Caitlin is the other side of the story. She was a remarkable woman in her own right. I did her biography, too, years after I did his. Her initial resistance was overcome with the help of a large payment. Caitlin was a bit of a terror when younger, and her marriage to Dylan was colourful, to say the least.

In 1991 I went to Sicily and spent weeks talking to her every day about her life and hard times, which was how she saw it. She had settled there happily enough with her partner, Giuseppe Fazio, and their son, Francesco Thomas Fazio. Caitlin died three years later. Despite an earlier instruction that her remains be burnt on a funeral pyre (‘symbolic of a martyred saint’), her body was brought back to Wales, and she lies beside her husband in the churchyard at Laugharne.

The Caitlin biography was well reviewed but sold badly. She remains more or less invisible, in the shadow of her husband’s vast reputation. Brief extracts from tape-recordings of her that I made much earlier – in London, in 1978, when I was planning an Observer article about her marriage – are on the site.

Caitlin had three children by Dylan:  Llewelyn (b. 1940),  Aeronwy (b. 1943) and Colm (b. 1949). Llewelyn, who looked a bit like Dylan, and was talented but troubled, died 2000. Aeronwy (Aeron), who wrote poetry and lectured, died 2009. Colm, the quietest of the three, lives in Italy.