The Writers of Wales Database

CONRAN, TONY

Email: lmconran@tiscali.co.uk

Poet, dramatist, translator and critic. Tony Conran was born in Bengal in 1931 and educated at Colwyn Bay and the University College, Bangor. He became Research Fellow and Tutor in the Department of English at University College, Bangor in 1957 and retired in 1982. Tony's specialism is Welsh poetry in both Welsh and English, but he is also very knowledgeable on traditional folksong and ballads.

As well as his works of literary criticism, he has published numerous highly regarded poetry collections and plays. He is noteworthy for his use of traditional Welsh material in his radical engagement with social and political issues. His poems are often presented dramatically, through performance or set to music, such as a recent project with the Dutch composer, Lowell Dijkstra. Nigel Jenkins edited a critical discussion of his work, entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at Tony Conran, which was published by the Welsh Union of Writers in 1995. Tony is a Fellow of Academi.

Selected Publications:
Formal Poems (1958)
Stelae and Other Poems (1965)
Spirit Level (1974)
Poems 1951–67 (1974)
Life Fund (Gomer, 1979)
The Cost of Strangeness (Gomer Press, 1982)
Blodeuwedd (Seren, 1988) 
Castles (Gomer, 1993)
All Hallows (Beekman, 1995)
Visions and Praying Mantids (Gomer, 1997)
Frontiers in Anglo–Welsh Poetry (University of Wales Press, 1997)
A Gwynedd Symphony (Cyfres Y Cymoedd) (Gomer, 1998)
Theatre of Flowers (Gomer, 1998)
Eros Proposes a Toast: Collected Poems and Gifts (Seren, 1999)
Branwen and Other Dance Dramas and Plays (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2003)
The Shape of My Country: Selected Poems and Extracts (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2004)
Skimmings (unpublished, 2004)
The Red Sap of Love: Collected Lyrical and Lyrcial Sequences (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2006)
What Brings you Here so Late? (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2008)

Contributed to:
The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (editor and translator) (Penguin, 1967)
Welsh Verse (editor) (Poetry Wales Press, 1986)
Cusan Dyn Dall / Blind Man’s Kiss (contributor) (Bloodaxe, 2001)




What Brings you Here so Late? (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2008)

A single autobiographical poem by Tony Conran, shaped around a fortune-telling pack of cards. Conran movingly evokes what it was like growing up as a child with cerebral palsy in wartime Wales, then being a student, poet and Catholic in Bangor, struggling with his place in the social world against the backdrop of the Thatcher years, coming to grips with death in the third movement.

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