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Kate Roberts

Katie Gramich author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Wales Press

Published:1st Feb '11

Should be back in stock very soon

Kate Roberts cover

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.

"In this remarkable work Katie Gramich draws on the full range of Robert's writings and on available secondary resources as well as interviews, letters, and papers in the archives of the National Library of Wales. The biographical material is handled carefully and attentively, avoiding simplification. This is a very accomplished example of the genre, opening up a lot of new material and providing a basis for further research and interpretation."--Fiona Robertson, Birmingham City University 'This volume, which provides a new perspective on the life and works of Kate Roberts, is written in a very accessible style. The coverage of Roberts' playwriting and of her non-fictional prose is much more extensive than in previous critical biographies, and the relation between the life and works, is illuminatingly detailed. Throughout, the focus is on Roberts as a woman writer, on her concern with the female perspective and on her own rather isolated position as a major female contributor to Welsh-language writing. Altogether then, the volume fulfils its promise of providing a fresh assessment in English of this important figure in the history of twentieth-century fiction.' Professor Jane Aaron (University of Glamorgan)

ISBN: 9780708323380

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 181g

160 pages