Library of Wales: Goodbye, Twentieth Century

Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923. He began his medical studies at the Welsh National School of Medicine and qualified as a doctor from Westminster Hospital, London in 1950. While still a student his first book of poems was published and his first play performed. Further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his New & Collected Poems (2003) and Running Late (2006). His first novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, appeared in 1954 and his most recent, the Booker long-listed The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas in 2002. His three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G (1990) and his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. He is president of the Welsh Academi and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Goodbye, Twentieth Century incorporates his acclaimed first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family, in a new volume which brings his life up to the present and the outset of a new century.'Incident and character are vividly depicted, period is richly evoked and the descriptive passages remind one what a splendid poet the author is.', Observer . 'An entertaining and at times moving book. Mr Abse relates some very amusing anecdotes, and his informal yet controlled style is capable of moving without any sense of dislocation from these lighter occasions to deeply serious and affecting passages.' Times Literary Supplement