Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on 27 October 1914. He began writing as a young teenager, filling exercise books with poems. He left school at sixteen to work as reporter for a local newspaper before devoting himself to writing, spending time in Swansea, rural Wales and London. His first poetry collection, 18 Poems, was published when he was only twenty.

In 1937 he moved to London, where he met Caitlin Macnamara, a dancer. They had three children together but their marriage was famously turbulent, exacerbated by their precarious financial situation and Thomas’s addictions.

A significant part of his working life was spent in America and it was there that an incomplete version of ‘Under Milk Wood’, a ‘play for voices’, was first performed in New York in 1953.

Celebrated and renowned for his poetry as well as for his rackety lifestyle, Dylan Thomas died in New York at the age of only thirty-nine. He was buried in Laugharne in rural Wales, a place he loved.