Dannie Abse

Poet Dannie Abse was born on 22 September 1923 in Cardiff to Jewish parents. He studied Medicine in Wales and at King's College, London, qualifying as a doctor in 1950. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983. He was given a Cholmondeley Award in 1985.

His poetry collections include Selected Poems (1970), winner of an Arts Council of Wales Literature Award; Pythagoras (1979); Way Out in the Centre (1981); Ask the Bloody Horse (1986); and White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988 (1989). He has also published fiction, including Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (1954) and O. Jones, O. Jones (1970), as well as non-fiction and plays, and he has edited many poetry anthologies. Goodbye, Twentieth Century: An Autobiography (2001) includes and updates his first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family (1974). His most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002), is set in 1950s London. The Two Roads Taken: A Prose Miscellany was published in 2003. In 2009, he won the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award.

Dannie Abse reads 'Return to Cardiff' from Welsh Retrospective (Seren):