Every day throughout May, you will be able to visit the Library of Wales website to download your free story, drawn from Story, vols I and II - a collection boasting the finest Welsh short fiction ever written and featuring some of the most talented literary names from both past and present, including the legendary Dylan Thomas and the award-winning Rachel Trezise, as well as read all about the chosen author.

 

 

 

  

 

 

Margiad Evans – the pseudonym of Peggy Whistler – was born in 1909 in Uxbridge, London. Her father was an insurance clerk, and her family moved to Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, in 1920 and it was with the Border counties that she chose to identify as a writer, and for that reason she adopted the Welsh nom de plume, Margiad Evans, from her father’s mother. She was educated in Ross and attended the Hereford School of Art, but writing soon displaced art as her primary work, becoming that for which she is best known and widely admired. Her novels are Country Dance (1932), The Wooden Doctor (1933), Turf or Stone (1934) and Creed (1936), all set in the Welsh countryside. Some of her books were self-illustrated. In the 1940s she married a Welshman e moved on a farm at Llangarron, near Ross, where she wrote her Autobiography (1943), where her journal and a selection of her essays are to be found. She also wrote numerous articles and short stories, collected in The Old and the Young (1948) and written while her husband was serving in the army, and two collections of poetry, Poems from Obscurity (1947) and A Candle Ahead (1956). Evans and her husband moved in 1950 to Elkstone, near Gloucester, where he was training to be a teacher. In this time she discovered that she was suffering from epilepsy, and two years later she wrote A Ray of Darkness (1952), an account of her experience of this disease. In 1953 they moved, with their daughter Cassandra, to Hartfield, Sussex, where he began teaching, whereas Evans’ health started declining, as she felt homesick for Wales. In 1954 she wrote a moving account of her life life after she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, The Nightingale Silenced.  She died in an hospital in Kent in 1958, a few weeks after she won a prize from the Welsh committee of the Arts Council for A Candle Ahead.

 

 

Turf or Stone (Library of Wales, 2011)

Country Dance (Library of Wales, 2005)

 

 

 

Story I (anthology) (Library of Wales, 2014)

Poetry (Library of Wales, 2007)