Richard Llewellyn
The years between the two World Wars saw a surge of novels rooted in regional working-class life, as writers drew on tight-knit communities and industrial landscapes to tell stories that mainstream literary culture had largely passed over. Richard Dafydd Vivian Llewellyn Lloyd, who published under the pen name Richard Llewellyn, emerged from that broad current as a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose work planted itself firmly in one particular corner of that world.
Born in Hendon to a family of Welsh descent, Llewellyn — the birth date recorded variously as late 1906 or early 1907 — brought an outsider's attachment to Wales into his writing. That combination of heritage and distance shaped his most enduring contribution to fiction. Working in English, he produced novels, journalism, and screenwriting across several decades, building a body of work that ranged across forms while keeping him rooted in the craft of storytelling.
His 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley stands as the work that defined his reputation. The book chronicles life in a coal mining village in the South Wales Valleys, following the rhythms, hardships, and bonds of a community shaped by the pit. It arrived at a moment when readers and critics alike were receptive to fiction that took working people and their landscapes seriously, and it found a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. The novel's success positioned Llewellyn as a writer who could render a specific, rooted world with enough vividness to carry readers far outside their own experience.
Llewellyn continued to write for the rest of his life, working across fiction and other forms until his death in Dublin on 30 November 1983. His career as a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter spanned several decades and more than one genre, though it was his fiction that drew the most sustained attention. He received the National Book Award, a recognition that confirmed the regard in which his work was held by the literary establishment. How Green Was My Valley, the novel he published in 1939, remained the work most closely associated with his name throughout his life and beyond.
Quotes by Richard Llewellyn
But to talk of the world that is hidden in every woman is a journey of pain, for the words are not in use to tell of it, and to use the words that are is only a hopping on uneven crutches.
So I went to bed, full, happy, and caring nothing for all the hurt of all the englished Welshmen that ever festered upon a proud land.
There is a fool you feel when somebody is saying they are sorry for doing something to you. It is worse than if you had done something yourself. So you are having the worst of it twice, start and finish.
And I wanted to be as I had been yesterday, a boy again, without the heaviness of doubt, this pressing fear, this new treachery that lifted to realms of singing gold, and in a little space, flung to pits of night.
It is strange that the mind will forget so much, and yet hold a picture of flowers that have been dead for thirty years or more...
Well,” my mother said, and she was not exactly smiling, but as though she was wrapping a smile inside a thought.
So with Dr. Johnson and John Stuart Mill, and Spencer, and William Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and Milton, and John Bunyan, and others of that royal company of bards, thanks to my father and Mr. Gruffydd, I was acquainted, more than plenty of other boys, and thus had a lasting benefit in school.
In dignity and harmony, in rich beauty rose their voices now employed in noble purpose. Glorious is the Voice of Man, and sweet is the music of the harp.
Everywhere was singing, all over the house was singing, and outside the house was alive with singing, and the very air was song.