The Writers of Wales Database

HUMPHREYS, EMYR

Emyr Humphreys is the author of twenty novels, several collections of stories and poetry and a volume of history. A former theatre and television director, he is a past winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Prize. He has won the Wales Book of the Year award twice, for Bonds of Attachment (Macdonald, 1992) and The Gift of a Daughter (Seren, 1999).

Emyr was born in Prestatyn in 1919 and attended Rhyl High. An English–speaker, he learned Welsh after the burning of the bombing school on the Llyn peninsula in 1936, when his interest in Welsh culture was first awakened. He read history at Aberystwyth, and later taught before joining the BBC as a drama producer in 1955. He moved to North West Wales in the mid 1960s and became a lecturer in drama at Bangor University, but left in 1972 to write full–time.

His first novel, Little Kingdom, was published in 1946. He went on to win the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1958 for Hear and Forgive (Gollancz, 1952) and the Hawthornden Prize in 1958 for A Toy Epic  (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958). He has also written and directed many television films in both Welsh and English.

Emyr Humphreys now lives in Llanfairpwll on Anglesey and is still busy writing. He is included in the University of Wales Press’ Writers of Wales Series in a work by Ioan Williams (1980), and several books have been published discussing his work including a collection of interviews entitled Dal Pen Rheswm (Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1999) edited by R.Arwel Jones, Emyr Humphreys: Conversations and Reflections (University of Wales Press, 2004) by M.Wynn Thomas and Emyr Humphreys: The Rigours of Inspection Poems and Stories (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2005), edited by Meic Stephens. A recent discursive work by Diane Green has been published by the University of Wales Press in the Writing Wales in English series, entitled Emyr Humphreys - A Postcolonial Novelist.

His most recent novel, entitled The Woman at the Window (Seren, 2009), was on the 2010 Wales Book of the Year Long List. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academi.

Reviews:
With respect The Woman at the Window (Seren, 2009)

"…A Welsh writer of European stature, Emyr Humphreys is at the height of his powers. Like Sandor Marai, he is a lord of irony, whose wry, sage wit and eagle eyesight capture a panorama of the twentieth century, with its fratricidal wars and struggling ideals, in a richly epigrammatic English. And on the human level, this volume speaks, through its cast of fascinating characters, intimately to the reader's heart…"
Stevie Davies

"…His style is clean, uncluttered, witty…"
New Welsh Review

"…[T]he author continues to be a keen student of human behaviour and motivation, remaining as intrigued by the choices that individuals make as he is by the historical forces that influence them. Emyr Humphreys continues to provide an antidote to a picture-postcard Wales whose inhabitants are, as one character puts it, 'obsessed with rugby and being famous and getting their names in lights in the West End'…"
Planet


Selected Publications: 
Little Kingdom (1946)
A Change of Heart: A Comedy (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951)
Hear and Forgive (Gollancz, 1952)
A Man’s Estate (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955) 
The Italian Wife (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957) 
A Toy Epic (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958)
The Gift (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963) 
Outside the House of Baal (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965) 
Dinas (Llyfrau’r Dryw, 1970)
Ancestor Worship: A Cycle of Eighteen Poems (Gwas Gee, 1970)
National Winner (MacDonald, 1971)
Flesh and Blood (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)
Best of Friends (Hodder & Stoughton, 1978)
Theatr Saunders Lewis (Astudiaethau Theatr Cymru) (Cymdeithas Theatr Cymru, 1979)
The Anchor Tree (Hodder & Stoughton, 1980)
Miscellany Two (Poetry Wales Press, 1981)
Etifedd Y Glyn (Gomer, 1981)
The Taliesin Tradition: A Quest for Welsh Identity (Black Raven Press, 1983)
Jones: A Novel (Dent, 1983)
Salt of the Earth (Dent, 1985)
Tri Llais (Cyhoeddiadau, 1985)
Absolute Hero (Dent, 1986)
Open Secrets (Dent, 1988)
The Triple Net: A Portrait of the Writer Kate Roberts, 1891-1985 (Channel 4 Television, 1988)
Outside Time (Channel 4 Television, 1991)
Bonds of Attachment (Macdonald, 1992)
Unconditional Surrender (Seren, 1996)
The Crucible of Myth (The W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture)(University of Wales, Swansea, 1999) 
The Gift of a Daughter (Seren, 1999)
The Collected Poems of Emyr Humphreys (University of Wales Press, 1999)
Ghosts and Strangers (Seren, 2001)
Old People are a Problem (Seren, 2003)
The Shop (Seren, 2005)
The Woman at the Window (Seren, 2009)



The Woman at the Window (Seren, 2009)

From the widow alone in the rectory drawing room to views across the sunny expanses of post-war Europe, celebrated writer Emyr Humphreys offers this urbane, mature collection.

His protagonists look back over the patterns of their lives and forward too, for the chance to untangle family relationships, rekindle lost loves, or find a home for themselves in familiar yet fresh surroundings.

To purchase this title from gwales.com, please click on its front cover