The Writers of Wales Database

SMITH, DAI

Contact via CREW on: 01792 295926

Professor Dai Smith was born in the Rhondda in 1945 and studied History at Oxford University and Literature at Columbia University, New York. He is the Raymond Williams Chair in Cultural History within the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, (CREW) at the University of Wales, Swansea which he joined in March 2005. He was Professor in the History of Wales at Cardiff University from 1985 to 1992 and Editor to BBC Radio Wales and Head of Programmes (English language) at BBC Wales from 1992 to 2001 when he was appointed Pro–Vice–Chancellor at the University of Glamorgan. He is currently Chair of the Arts Council of Wales.

He has also been a Simon Senior Fellow at the University of Manchester and a visiting lecturer at Universities in Germany, Holland, France, Spain, Denmark, Ireland and England. He is now Series Editor of the Welsh Assembly Government’s Library of Wales for classic works written in English from or about Wales.

Dai published a major authorised biographical work on Raymond Williams, Wales’ most influential 20th century intellectual figure whose papers have been deposited in University of Wales, Swansea. It was The Guardian Book of the Week in May 2008 and was on the 2009 Wales Book of the Year Long List. Dai has also begun research into key aspects of the cultural and creative history of Wales since 1945. For television he has presented and scripted a number of award-winning documentaries and, as a broadcaster, sought to deepen popular appreciation of Welsh culture and history. 

In the Frame: Wales 1910-2010 (Parthian, 2010) was on the 2011 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

Reviews:
With respect to Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale (Parthian, 2008)

"…It is a remarkable piece of work and will henceforth be essential to the understanding of the making of Raymond Williams…"
Eric Hobsbawm

"…A Superb Biography…"
Terry Eagleton, The Guardian

"…This is a worthwhile book and a very good one…"
David Hare


With respect to In the Frame: Wales 1910-2010 (Parthian, 2010)

"…A superb biography…graphic, richly detailed and subtly shaded…in these packed, lucidly written pages…"
Terry Eagleton, The New Welsh Review

"...Smith has done all that we can ask the historian as biographer to do..."
London Review of Books

"...This is a worthwhile book and a very good one..."
David Hare, The Guardian


Selected Publications:
Gwyn Thomas 1913-1981 (Writer’s World) (International Specialized Book Service Inc, 1987)
Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales (University of Wales Press, 1993)  
The Fed: History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (University of Wales Press, 1998)
Wales: A Question for History (Seren, 1999)
Regenerating Wales (Institute of Welsh Affairs) (Welsh Academic Press, 2005)
Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale (Parthian, 2008)
In the Frame: Wales 1910-2010 (Parthian, 2010)

Contributed to:
Fields of Praise: Official History of the Welsh Rugby Union, 1881-1981 (with Professor Gareth Williams) (University of Wales Press, 1980)
Through Fire and Water (co-writer) (Oriel Stringer, 1997)
The People of Wales (co-editor) (Gomer, 1999)
A Community and Its University: Glamorgan 1913-2003 (co-editor) (University of Wales Press, 2003)

         

Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale (Parthian, 2008)

Using a rich array of material from Raymond Williams’s hitherto unused personal papers - juvenilia, diaries, letters, unpublished novels and stories, notebooks, work drafts and fragments - Dai Smith takes us through the formative years on the Welsh Border as the son of a railway signalman and his wife, on to Cambridge in 1939 and War service in Normandy, to show in telling detail how the making of Culture and Society (1958) and the writing of his novel Border Country (1960) was all of a piece in the conceptual breakthrough he strove to make in the 1950s.The meaning of Raymond Williams is revealed in his making. This biography places its central figure within a deeply researched social and cultural history so that we can see again, as Raymond Williams insisted we should that culture is "a whole way of life".

To purchase a copy of this title via gwales.com, please click on its front cover



In the Frame: Wales 1910-2010 (Parthian, 2010)

From Rhondda heroes chasing the American dream to rioters staking a claim in their society In the Frame is a powerful alternative history of twentieth-century south Wales, offered from the personal viewpoint of cultural historian Dai Smith.

It takes the reader into a territory formed by the influence of writers and painters, boxers and historians, friends and relatives, rioters and correspondents, critics and photographers.

As well as the autobiographical overtones of a Tonypandy childhood and distinguished career, In the Frame contains the far wider undertones of a collective biography. Its mosaic pieces together the consciousness of a society which led its inhabitants in search of fame and fortune as well as the daily struggle for rights and recognition without sympathy or sentimentality. It takes the reader into a territory formed by the influence of writers and painters, boxers and historians, friends and relatives, rioters and correspondents, critics and photographers.

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