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Dannie Abse

Poet Dannie Abse was born on 22 September 1923 in Cardiff to Jewish parents. He studied Medicine in Wales and at King's College, London, qualifying as a doctor in 1950. His first collection of poetry, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1948, and he has continued to combine his careers as both a doctor (he was a specialist at the Central Medical Establishment chest clinic between 1954 and 1989) and writer, aspects of his life that, together with his Jewish background and Welsh nationality, are integral themes in his poetry.

Dannie Abse was Senior Fellow of the Humanities at Princeton University (1973-4), and President of the Poetry Society (1978-92). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, Fellow of the Welsh Academy of Letters in 1992 (President 1995-), Honorary Fellow at the University of Wales College of Medicine (1999), and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universities of Wales (1989) and Glamorgan (1997). He was given a Cholmondeley Award in 1985.

His poetry collections include Selected Poems (1970), winner of an Arts Council of Wales Literature Award; Pythagoras (1979); Way Out in the Centre (1981); Ask the Bloody Horse (1986); and White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988 (1989). He has also published fiction, including Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (1954) and O. Jones, O. Jones (1970), as well as non-fiction and plays, and he has edited many poetry anthologies. Goodbye, Twentieth Century: An Autobiography (2001), includes and updates his first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family (1974). His most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002), is set in 1950s London.  The Two Roads Taken: A Prose Miscellany was published in 2003.

Dannie Abse was married to the late Joan Mercer, art historian, with whom he edited two books, Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures (1986) and The Music Lover's Literary Companion (1988).

His latest poetry collection is Running Late (2006). His latest book of memoir, The Presence (2007), is a celebratory portrait of his 50-year marriage.

Dannie Abse poems:

The GamePhew

A Winter visitGive me your hands

ThingsLunch with a Pathologist

Famous Welsh       Poets and Writers

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