Emyr Humphreys

Who is Emyr Humphreys?

Emyr Humphreys is a leading Welsh novelist, poet and author. He was born at Prestatyn in Flintshire, and educated at Rhyl High School and University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He registered as a conscientious objector in the Second World War, working on a farm, and later doing relief work in Egypt and Italy. After the war he worked as a teacher, as a radio producer at the BBC and later became a lecturer in drama at Bangor University.

During his long bilingual writing career, he has published over twenty novels, which include such classics as A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, and The Land of the Living, an epic sequence of seven novels charting the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales: Flesh and Blood; The Best of Friends; Salt of the Earth; An Absolute Hero; Open Secrets; National Winner, and Bonds of Attachment. He has also written plays for stage and television, short stories, The Taliesin Tradition, and published his Collected Poems in 1999.

Among many honours, he was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award in 1958 for Hear and Forgive, and the Hawthornden Prize for A Toy Epic the same year. Humphreys won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 1992 and 1999. Humphreys is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.