The Legacy of Dylan Thomas Symposium

In Dylan Thomas’ centenary year, an exciting symposium made up of a diverse panel will explore the poet’s legacy in his native Wales and beyond.

Features of the evening include: Images from Dan Llywelyn Hall’s exhibitionDeaths and Entrances projected throughout, special guest readings, book signings, Q&A session.

Chaired by Graham Fawcett – President of T.S. Eliot Society
Panel includes:
Dr Rowan Williams
Dan Llywelyn Hall – Artist whose exhibition Deaths and Entrances runs concurrently at the Coningsby Gallery with images inspired by Thomas’ short stories and verse
Andrew Lycett – Author of Dylan Thomas’ biography
Jeff Towns – Chairman of Dylan Thomas Society
Hilly Janes – Dylan Thomas biographer
John Goodby – Editor of Collected Poems

Due to ill health, Dannie Abse has sadly withdrawn from the symposium

The Right Reverend Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth PC DD FBA FRSL FLSW (born 14 June 1950) is an Anglican prelate, theologian and poet. Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he held from December 2002 to December 2012, and was previously Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, making him the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England. Williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 to take up the position of Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013. Later in 2013 he was appointed Chancellor of the University of South Wales. Justin Welby succeeded him in the chair of St Augustine on 9 November 2012, being enthroned in March 2013. On 26 December 2012 10 Downing St announced Williams’ elevation to the peerage as a Life Baron, so that he could continue to speak in the Upper House. Following the creation of his title on 8 January and its gazetting on 11 January 2013, he was introduced to the temporal benches of the House of Lords as Baron Williams of Oystermouth on 15 January 2013.

Graham Fawcett is a writer, teacher and lecture-performer who has worked for The Poetry School in London since it began in 1997 and who talks about poets past and present to audiences and groups. His lecture-performances, Seven Olympians, have toured galleries, bars and bookshops in England and continue in 2014 alongside a new tour, World Poets (Yeats, Lorca, Frost, Heaney, Szymborska, Bishop, Whitman and Ted Hughes). He is also doing two series in London on The Divine Comedy and Homer’s Odyssey in Art, and taking day sessions for The Poetry School on Dylan Thomas, the South Americans, Elizabeth Bishop and World War I poets. He has made many programmes on literature, music and Italy for Radio 3, including a translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova for BBC Radio Drama on 3. He has lived in Italy and Catalan France, and now lives in Holborn.

Andrew Lycett is an English biographer and journalist. After studying history at Oxford University, he worked for two decades as a foreign correspondent, specialising in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Since the mid-1990s he has concentrated on writing biographies. He is the author of a much praised life of Dylan Thomas. His other subjects include Colonel Gadaffi, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, most recently, Wilkie Collins. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Dan Llywelyn Hall was born in Cardiff and graduated in 2003 and in the same year was awarded The Sunday Times Young Artist of the Year prize. Subsequently, he was shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award in 2009 and has attracted both private and public collections including the National Gallery of Wales, Imperial War Museum London, The Royal Collection, House of Lords, Museum of Modern Art Wales and the Contemporary Art Society of Wales. Widely exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions including the Saatchi Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Wales. His recent portrait of Her Majesty the Queen was the subject of international attention after its unveiling in Cardiff last year.

Jeff Towns is an antiquarian bookseller who has run Dylan’s Bookstore in Swansea for approaching 50 years. During that time he has always focussed on the History, Topography, Folk-lore and Literature of Wales, with a further obsessive specialisation in the books, letters, manuscripts, and iconography of Dylan Thomas. He is now considered something of an expert on the life and works of this great poet.  In this centenary year he has been making films, curating exhibitions and writing books about Swansea’s most famous literary son. He recently was consultant, and appeared in the Mentorn/ BBC Film on Sir Peter Blake’s Under Milk Wood Project.  His recent books include ‘Dylan Thomas – The Pubs’ for Y Lolfa and ‘Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas’ and A ‘Pearl of a Great Price – The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas to Pearl Kazin’, both for Parthian Books.

Hilly Janes is the daughter of the artist Alfred Janes, whose close friendship with Thomas is the subject of her new highly-acclaimed biography, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (The Robson Press). Born on the Gower peninsula, the landscape and people of rural south west Wales and Swansea evoked so vividly in Thomas’s work were those of her own childhood. Hilly was one of the founding journalists ofThe Independent, and has also been an editor on The Times and Prospectmagazine, as well as working freelance for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph,The Observer and The Financial Times. She lives with her family in north London, where she works as a freelance writer, media consultant and events organiser.

John Goodby was born in Birmingham and educated at Hull and Leeds Universities. He has taught at Leeds University, University College Cork and, since 1994, Swansea University, where he holds a personal chair. He has published widely on Irish, Welsh, English and British poetry and is a Fellow of the English Association. He is the author of Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (2000) and The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall(2013), and is the editor of the new centenary Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (2014). He won the Cardiff International poetry competition in 2006, and his books of poetry include Illennium (2010), A True Prize (2011), and a translation ofHeine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale (2005).