Bringing Dahl home

A groundbreaking insight into the place of Wales in the imagination of the world’s number one storyteller was revealed by a Cardiff University academic in a discussion at this year’s iconic Hay Literary Festival.

In the Gwyn Jones Lecture event (supported by Literature Wales) at Hay, Professor Damian Walford Davies, Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, discussed the landmark new book he has edited, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected.

The volume, published to mark the centenary of Dahl’s birth, explores the author’s life and work through a new lens – the country of his birth and early life – with contributions that startlingly reveal the shaping presence of Wales in his fiction for both children and adults.

Damian was joined by three of the book’s contributors: Tomos Owen (Bangor University), Siwan Rosser (Cardiff University, School of Welsh) and Carrie Smith (Cardiff University, School of English, Communication and Philosophy).

“The book achieves something genuinely new, revealing the horizons that open up when we read this complex man and his work through an uncanny Welsh lens”, explains Professor Walford Davies. “In bringing Dahl home, we make him vitally unhomely.

“The result is not a local or parochial Dahl, but an author whose Wales and Welshness are to be seen in complex international contexts.”

Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected took place on Thursday 2 June.