dylan thomas boathouse

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914 and died in New York in 1953. He was one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to resonate in the popular imagination: fans today include Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Pierce Brosnan, Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, and Mick Jagger, whose Jagged Films is currently working on a feature film of the writer’s life. Best known for his poetry and for the ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, Thomas also wrote fiction (including short stories and novels), film-scripts and various radio broadcasts. He was also a prolific letter writer and performer of other people’s work.

His early writing shows an interest in the experimental artistic movements of the early twentieth century, with much of his poetry and prose of the 1930s manifesting surrealist and gothic elements. His middle period work of the late 1930s and early 1940s was directly influenced by crises of the Second World War, during which Thomas worked for the propaganda machine of the BBC in London. His late work engages with both the politics of the post-war period and the environment and geography of West Wales. An interest in the processes of the natural world is recurrent (if changing) throughout Thomas’s poetry and prose.

Familiar with, and in a sense, ‘at home’ in, West Wales from early childhood (his father’s family were from Carmarthenshire), Thomas first moved to Laugharne in 1937, living in a fisherman’s cottage before moving to ‘Sea View’, and finally returning to live in ‘The Boat House’ at Laugharne in 1949. He lived there with his wife, Caitlin, and children, Colm, Aeronwy and Llewelyn until the time of his death.