John Llewelyn Rhys Author

John Llewelyn Rhys (1911-1940) was born in Abergavenny and died in an RAF training accident just before the Battle of Britain in 1940. He published The Flying Shadow in 1936, and The World Owes Me A Living in 1939 and England is My Village in 1941 (the latter two also reissued in one volume by Handheld Press). England is My Village won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1942. In the same year the novelist Jane Oliver set up the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in her late husband’s memory: ‘something to give young writers the extra chance he didn’t get’.