Edge Hill Professor celebrates famous Welsh writer in new book

A pioneering book that celebrates the 90th birthday of one of Wales' most prestigious writers has been written by Professor Linden Peach at Edge Hill University.

His book is the first to consider Emir Humphreys' fiction from a contemporary critical perspective and to stress its relevance to the 21st century.

A prolific writer for over half a century, Humphreys' work as novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist and television producer is extraordinarily impressive. Although he writes in both Welsh and English, it is his English language fiction for which he is best known.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Humphreys played a major part in the Welsh-language campaigns which helped the language acquire the status in Wales it now enjoys.

He learned Welsh as an adult and then converted to nationalism around the time of the arson attacks on the RAF bombing school led by the inspirational Welsh-language writer Saunders Lewis. Humpherys also registered as a conscientious objector at the outbreak of the Second World War, an experience about which he writes in Outside the House of Baal.

Although Humphreys is in his ninetieth year, he shows no signs of slowing up and his recent work is considered the best he has ever written. Professor Peach says: "As a student in mid-Wales in the 1970s and as someone in touch with his Welsh roots, I have first-hand experience of the peaks and troughs in the development of an increasingly independent Wales. Humphreys is one of the few Welsh writers to have followed this process in depth and to use it as such a rich source of his own writing."

"I first met Humphreys when I invited him to read to the student society at Aberystwyth and probably no one has had such a profound influence on my own understanding of myself as a Welshman."

Professor Peach, who graduated from the same Welsh university college as Emyr Humphreys, is well known and respected for his work on Welsh literature. He is an honorary research fellow of Swansea University and was recently elected a member of the Welsh academy. This book is both a critical study and a deeply personal engagement with Humphreys' work which has inspired him to become a student of the Welsh language.

"Although I have a long way to go to be really fluent in Welsh, I enjoy working in Welsh. I think this is something that Humphreys discovered and understood." 

His latest book Emyr Humphreys' Fiction: Contemporary Critical Perspectives will be published shortly by the University of Wales Press, Cardiff.