Measuring the Distance

Dai Smith was born in the Rhondda in 1945. His writing has encompassed history, biography, essays and criticism. He was the Series Editor of the Library of Wales and Chair of the Arts Council Wales and was made a CBE for services to arts and culture in Wales in 2016. He currently edits the Modern Wales Series and is Chair of the Dylan Thomas Prize. His memoir Off the Track was published in 2023.

When you come out for the bell aged eighty you have no choice but to employ a late style. This is mine. A mix of deceitfully plain reportage; fictive history and fictional forays into the past; personalised reflections and more shaded perspectives from others; some poetry and polemics; glances of delight at the playfulness of sport and the charisma of personalities; taking a stance, whether orthodox or southpaw, in the courage to live with what you are given no matter what is put in front of you. And the illusion of randomrepetition, the rat tat tat bam bam, before any change in the angle of attack. But that’s enough bobbing out of reach, jabbing and sliding away with pretty dancing around the ring.One of Wales’s most successful interpretive voices of a generation casts his mind back to the preceding decades to offer a retrospective take on the legacy of the Labour party in Wales in a genre-defying work written in Dai’s inimitable signature style.