Date:

Friday March 3rd

Woolff Gallery
89 Charlotte St,
Fitzrovia,
London
W1T 4PU

Wales Week in London presents a launch of the new book Ugly, Lovely by Hilly Janes. Hilly will be in conversation with Jasper Rees, 6 – 8pm.
“An exciting new publication that allows us to inch ever closer to this genius of a man” Cerys Matthews

Hilly Janes found a stunning 1950s photo album made by her aunt Ethel Ross depicting the places that Dylan Thomas wove into his work in Swansea and Carmarthenshire, which is published alongside the first UK edition of the Dylan Thomas playlet Lunch at Mussolini’s.

Ethel Ross’s niece, the journalist and biographer Hilly Janes, author of The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, continues her exploration of the poet and his life in her new book, Ugly, Lovely: Dylan Thomas’s Swansea and Carmarthenshire of the 1950s in pictures. Her work has been praised as “an engaging, accessible biography” (Natasha Tripney, The Observer). Personal and unpretentious, it altered the myth of Dylan Thomas by presenting the man through the eyes of his creative Swansea friends, and particularly Hilly’s father, the artist Alfred Janes.

Cerys Matthews has written the foreword, and John Goodby, editor of the The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas and Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University, has contributed an essay about the literary significance of the places in Thomas’s work.
This engaging book, which brings together Dylan Thomas’s haunts and writing, also includes a satirical sketch previously unpublished in the UK, written by Dylan Thomas as a commentary on fascism.

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