Ned Thomas


Publications

Although beginning his academic output with a study of the English writer George Orwell, it was with The Welsh Extremist that the main focus of his publishing career began. He had originally returned to Wales with the intention of writing a novel but instead produced this study of Welsh-language writers and the culture they inhabited. Although the work was written in English and conceived of as introducing Welsh writing and culture to a radical English audience, it had most success in Wales and has been reprinted several times since being picked up for a paperback edition by the mainly Welsh-language press Y Lolfa. His bilingual essay on the poet Derek Walcott was commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales when Walcott was awarded their International Writer’s Prize in 1980. The move from English to Welsh as the main language of his critical output came with the publication of his study of Waldo Williams a figure of some importance in Twentieth Century Welsh culture both because of the emphasis on community in his poetry and the intensity of his view of its importance for the identity of the Welsh people. In Bydoedd, subtitled as a “cofiant cyfnod” rather than a conventional autobiography, Ned Thomas reviews the events of his own life against the historical background of the post-war years in Germany, the Cold War years in Russia and the re- emergence of the national identities of minority peoples following the period of expansive nationalisms earlier in the Twentieth Century.