Collected Stories

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) was one of the few great British writers of the Second World War. His early death at the age of twenty-eight robbed Wales of its most promising poet and story writer.

Although he had been writing since an early age, becoming a soldier had a stimulating effect on Lewis''s writing: his first book of poems, Raiders'' Dawn, was published in 1942, and The Last Inspection, a collection of stories, appeared in the same year, alerting critics and editors to the arrival of a new war writer. Both books are characterised by vivid realism and emotional power.

Later in 1942 Lewis''s new regiment, the South Wales Borderers, travelled to India. His experiences there are recreated in the beautiful poems of Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets and the stories and letters of In the Green Tree. On the reputation of these four books Alun Lewis is widely seen, with Keith Douglas, as the outstanding writer of World War Two.

Collected Stories reprints the war stories in their entirety for the first time. It also collects stories published in student magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, together with several previously unseen. In bringing together all this material, editor Cary Archard shows Lewis''s development from remarkable schoolboy writer to mature and established author whose stories appeared in magazines such as Horizon and Lilliput.

"... one of the mightiest poets and fiction writers of the twentieth century... a superb Collected Stories"
Richard Simpson, Tar River Poetry

"So lyrical, so larky, that, almost unconsciously, one starts to read them aloud to an empty room"
Sunday Times

"Each story is a gem, full of wise understanding of human experience, and deeply moving"
PN Review

"Stories of such artistry that one is inclined to reread them immediately to savour the moments they capture"
Publishers'' Weekly

Alun Lewis (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and short story writer, died, aged twenty-eight, in Burma in the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others describe his poetry as the path from pre-war Yeats and Auden to post-war poets like Hughes and Gunn. In Wales there are those who think his greater versatility and finer intelligence place him above his contemporaries Dylan Thomas and R.S. Thomas.